A pleasant morning such as this can never go wrong. I leaned my bicycle on a roadside tree to relieve myself of the nature call. When I returned, a cat greeted me with its front paws on the bicycle’s front tyre. I squatted before him for a better look; he was a lovely kitten, the blue irises of his eyes dropped back to reveal dark vertical pupils. I proceeded to pat him on his nape, lifted him up and held by my chest. I ran my fingers around his tender ears; he flapped them fitfully to discourage me. Sitting under the shade of the broad leafed tree that revelled in a cornucopia of leaves, I befriended the kitten; counted his toes and patted his bumpy spine. I wound my palm into a cylindrical aperture and playfully lifted his tail; at this, his soft ebony furred tail slipped like a limp snake.
Picking up speed racing down the incline, i felt like a laser torch beam that gouged tunnels into mountains. As I bicycled back to the laboratory, the cold winter wind wafted through the narrow under hang openings of my t-shirt sleeves to titillate me. To my right, the sea expanded like a greenish blue sari with a white hemline and random patches of thin white squares knitted into the fabric. The road itself was beautifully carpeted with dry twigs on either end. Alone in this picturesque gallery of ensorcelling images, I bicycled my way into the tunnel that was lit with sodium lights; a brownish hue drowned me in its atmosphere. So incongruous, I thought, that a melancholic tunnel should be dug in a charming place like this.
Back at the laboratory, I fed the kitten, lent him a pillow to sleep, and got to work. Recorded the readings – blood pressure: normal; brain activity: optimal; dream resilience: 7.34/10. I quickly jotted down the readings, held the syringe with the eighth fluid, tapped it a bit, and injected into my forehead. For the last two years, I have been working on dream stimulators. This is my daily routine; all my previous attempts with the seven different fluids have failed to prove their mettle. This eighth fluid was a mixture of mercury and yeasts.
In the dream, the kitten had grown into an enormous cat; his eyelids flapped like the wings of an eagle. The vertical pupils sank in a sea of blue like the eyes of an alligator that stays submerged with its eyes forked open on the surface. His whiskers like great arms of a metamorphosed bug were propped inertly behind the triangular nostrils. I was a minnow; rat like, proceeded towards the cat’s ears; the tender pink tissue had developed cracks and I slid into one of them. A muffled thud followed my fall into the pitch blankness; it took me a while to get adapted to the dark and soon enough, one after another, objects emerged out of the dark to reveal their silhouettes. I was caught in a pool of cat’s mucous; with great difficulty I stepped out of the knee depth mucous onto one of the pink tissue flakes. Around me were other pink flakes floating over the viscous pool; overhead, a spiralling shaft tapered into a tiny hole that let light trickling down into a circular patch about ten feet away from me. I worked out that the sunlit patch marked the perimeter of the pool, for the patch was propped against a green slithering wall.
It was dizzying; my nose was burning, and lungs were irritable. From the mushy crests of the tapered shafts, a drone emanated and hurriedly encircled me. This drone ricocheted strongly; pressure waves disturbed the knee deep mucous membrane around me; the pool broke into ripples and gathered around me like the wrinkles of an old woman. On one of the pink flakes, I stayed afloat like a cork. Unlike the restless ripples of a pond filled with water, this viscous fluid’s undulations rose up in waves and sedately poured into troughs before them like a melodic song. Then a heavy jarring sound followed the opening of shutters behind me; rows of intricately wired network of hair cells greeted me from behind the shutters. It must have been the pressure waves; sufficient pressure must have triggered the hair cells behind the walls of this viscous pool. Presently, the ripples carried me towards the open shutters.
As I walked along leisurely, the shutters closed behind me and the incessant droning ceased. A banyan root suspended from the roof lowered itself to meet my eyes; it settled like a halo on my head. Before I realised what was going on, a brief and violent spark ensued an exchange between the rows of wired hair cells and the banyan root shaped nerve. The exchange itself was nothing short of dramatic – a beam of flashing light doused the wires below it, and from the centre of this dousing light, like a hand, a sharp electrical impulse originated that kissed the cheeks of wires below it and sucked the electrical discharge. And the halo shaped nerve follicle receded to the roof.
Unable to contain myself the curiosity, I hung to the halo as it rose up to meet the roof. The roof was a bulbous intestinal cathedral; velvety fabric was creased and wrapped into folds. A long horizontal turret of hollowed sticky valley separated two halves of the roof. The halo that I hung to dragged me along to the left hemisphere; here, deep furrows ran haphazardly along the pink tissue. Cylindrical pipes that resembled capillaries vented blood into the porous parts of the hemisphere; I looked about me to locate the origin of the humungous capillaries and found a watchtower sized arterial lobe in the corner.
The halo eventually disappeared into the left hemisphere leaving me nervously clinging to one of the capillaries. Then the capillary came loose from its hinge and spurted blood like a camel whose throat had been cut open. And in a frightening speed, I lost my grip and fell on the floor between the wires; the stream of blood carried me over to the shutters that opened to the viscous pool and its incessant drone. And I was wafted through the tapered shaft overhead into the open. I fell before the cat; it opened its alligator mouth to reveal a lapping tongue the size of a two storeyed building, and began licking me like a doll that had been thrown before it.
The taste of its epithelial layer must have done the trick, as the cat gradually shrunk into tis original kitten size. I ran my fingers around its ears and it sank its head low in obeisance, this was contrary to its original fretful behaviour in reality.
Once outside the dream, I tried to make sense of it all. The dream stimulator was a success; not only was the dream dramatic, creative and drew its energy from reality, it eventually succumbed before me. Under the microscope, I observed the yeast. It had mutated into an entirely different and inept species - they were no longer agile. I simulated the experiment and the revelation resonated with a great invention. Under the helpful medium of mercury, organic compounds released during the process of mutation had stimulated the brain cells, and gave vent to fantastical dreams.
What I liked most was the underpinning of reality; what I did not realise was that the stimulator left residual electrical impulses in the brain of the recipient. I was to find that out next morning when I had a rat’s underbelly hanging limp between my teeth.
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