It was a dream, wasn't it?

Some time ago, I had a dream.

Or did I?

Have you ever had a dream that felt so real, even after you woke up, that was so fresh in the mind days later, that you often wondered if it really was a dream? Or did it really happen without you realising it? Can you manage to sneak away from your life and live a completely different life and still make it back in time to catch the bus to work?

In DDLJ, Simran asks her father to take a month out of her own life and give it to her to live. I wonder if that can really work literally. Is it possible that we can take a few moments, days, months or even years out of our own life, and live it like a dream, and suddenly wake up and find ourselves back where we were, with the same familiar faces that had been with us, sans the moments, days, months and years that had passed and yet, somehow had not passed?

Long ago, I saw an episode of the X-files, where the same day was being repeated over and over again. And no one realised it, except one girl. Every one would wake up to the same day, not knowing it, and would live their life for the day in the exact same way. Every single day. And the lone girl looked on, bewildered, waiting for the cycle to end, the glitch to fix itself, so life could go on normally.

What is time really?

Going back to my dream, it was strange and unfamiliar. And yet, it was magical. It was different. I was different. The way I live my life, my strict discipline, my fierce independence, my attitude towards life, my values, my expectations, my feelings, every thing seemed to have different shades. I could not recognise my own self. It was good and it was bad.

It felt like I had taken some moments out of my own life and was living someone else's life. And then the dream got over and I returned to the point where I had left my original life. Without anyone around me realising it. As if I had chosen to take an overhead bridge instead of crossing the road at the traffic light along with the others. And somehow, I had crossed the bridge so fast, that I reached the other side of the road at the exact same time as the others did. And no one had even realised that I had taken a different path, and was missing. I had stolen a few moments of my own life and lived it by myself as I crossed the bridge.

Yet somehow, it did not seem like a dream. I really was living that life. Every time I close my eyes, I can still see that dream so clearly. I can relive each moment as if it had really happened. I had laughed in it, cried in it, got angry in it, loved in it. Even now, I can sense those feelings. It felt so real, it was scary. But it never happened, did it?

Yes, I loved it. At times more than my real life. But if I were given the choice to go on living in that dream and never wake up, what would I do? Would I choose to live that alternate life or would I be happy to go back to my old life, where everything was familiar, where I recognised people around me, where I knew myself? Which one was the real deal? Was the dream my real life, or was my real life the dream?

Now I have woken up, and I am wondering.

A dream it was and I should dismiss it as one. It was not real. I will never have that dream again. It will never cross paths with my real life.

It was just a dream.

Wasn't it?