Prior to 2004, remembering dreams had become a long-forgotten art for me. Either I was having dreamless nights or my dreams were so inconsequential that they never rose to the conscious level and nudged me into remembrance.
Just when I resigned myself to more dreamless nights, the reigning Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan came along. No, not in person but we met up when I drifted into the land of nod. This time, I remembered the dream clearly because I was confronting Khan on a certain issue.
“Why aren’t you protected?” I asked him.
Khan snapped his fingers. Two bodyguards wearing pale blue shirts appeared from behind me and inspected the area, their backs to Khan and me.
That’s how much I remembered of my dream.
I mentioned this to Tarun Cherian, the then creative director at Scion Advertising who was also a reiki master and spiritual guide. Without much ado, he placed before me three possible interpretations:
One: Khan’s life could well be under threat.
Two: Khan might be feeling threatened by competition from newcomers or he might be going through bouts of low self-esteem because some consider Aamir to be a far better actor.
Three: Khan could well be me feeling threatened about something like the meditation workshop I was to take up with Cherian a few days later. But I was protected, if the dream was to be believed.
The ball was in my court. I was to accept one of the options that best suited the situation. I thought option three might be most accurate. Here I was trying to take up a two-day meditation workshop a few days later to ‘expand my soul’ and didn’t know what it meant or what I was getting into. But curiosity was what got me into journalism and curiosity was what got me into saying ‘yes’ to the workshop. Since the dream said I was protected, I went ahead.
The workshop went along swimmingly and I was anything but threatened – I was rejuvenated beyond my expectations.
On Sunday, Shah Rukh Khan was all over the TV channels. At least two persons were killed and 15 injured when a bomb exploded at the fag end of his concert in Sri Lanka on Saturday, December 11, 2004. But the actor was safe. Reports said the bomb had ripped through the 10,000-rupee stands just as the Bollywood superstar ended his three-hour concert (it was held despite protests by Buddhist monks who said the musical show coincided with the first death anniversary of a popular monk.)
What does all this mean? That, sometimes, dreams should be taken seriously.