SCARY NIGHTS...

As I lay on the floor, I felt the vehicle run over the fingers of my left hand. My breath was caught in my chest as I tried to heave my left hand to safety...
And I entered the real world, as the 'dream' world went out of focus. It was 1.30 AM. It was my maternal grand mom (and not a vehicle that) almost stepped on my hand which was under a bed sheet. I controlled my scream so that the result was a gasp that only I could hear. So peace reigned in the night... I was still shocked by the frightful nightmare that I decided to get myself a glass of water. As I walked, I remembered some of the nightmares I had as a kid.

When I was hardly three, we used to live in Hyderabad. The house we lived in had two entrances, one in the front and the other through the back. One fine night, I ended up crying that a bull entered our home through the back and tried to butt my mom... Reality, now that i realise, was that I had seen a cow shed close to my home the same day. I had seen cows perhaps for the first time then. So the unknown animal caused me some scare in the night, apart from disturbing others' sleep.

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I smiled to myself as I walked back to the bedroom. People made fun of that particular incident until I was ten. "What's the significance of ten years?" might your question. I'll take time to answer that...

This incident was when I was ten (as you might intelligently guess)... We moved to Chennai just that year. We'd just finished setting up our household articles that week. It was only my mom, my bro and me at home. One day, suddenly, at 5 in the morning, I started to see images of 'the Hindu God of Death'... I screamed with all the force that my lungs could possibly produce... Thinking back, I read up some part of Mahabharatha, around that time. The way the Pandava Brothers died after consuming the water from the forbidden lake had its effect on me... at least that is my guess at the moment. Ever since, I have never taken a mythology at face value... But, my scream was enough to make my mom jump. But my brother continued to sleep peacefully.

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I tried to suppress a guffaw which forced itself out of my mouth. I went back to bed trying to supress my thoughts and try to catch up on my sleep... I usually visualize outer space and some planets, stars and asteroids... This trick works most often. But, not this time. My mind wandered to think about the existance of powers beyond us... I've been brought up in an orthodox family, so I never question the existance of God, but merely questions like where he is, and what he does and other such questions that one cannot answer to get a satisfactory answer.

I remembered a real life incident that my paternal grand dad narrated when I was around 13 years old. His mom was claimed to have been dead for over a day before she came back to life!!! The story revolves around the fact that the minions of 'the Hindu God of Death' that I mentioned earlier made a mistake in taking the wrong soul to hell. She even described the conditions she was made to experience - like being tied up in a jute bag, and being just elevated through space, and communicating in telepathy. It depends on you, whether you believe the story or not, but my concern was that she died(permanently at the age of 108) before I got a chance to ask her more questions about where she went, what she saw, etc. I thought it was a big joke until I heard that similar instances took place all over the world...

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I'd had enough scares for a night... I couldn't take it any longer... I screamed.......... :)