Sins hadn’t seen a dream in weeks, and for some reason this fact bothered him because he believed dreams carried secret messages conveyed from his soul to his conscious, thinking self, his mind. Dreams were fascinating, they were like a puzzle, a riddle to solve, by associating images together through whatever logic possible, and most wondrously, dreams could come true, provided one sought to solve the puzzle with complete sincerity and diligence, which are difficult to sustain after a period, courtesy the age of instant gratification, people lived in at the moment, rightly dubbed the golden period of humankind, where every desire could be satisfied at a whim, literally every desire, good or bad. Good or bad. Yes, every desire.
Exactly one year ago, Sins had felt broken because he felt that for his age, he wasn’t living the life he had dreamt about. He was twenty-two years old last year. He had been a big fan of Instagram, sucking in the visual delights being played on-screen hour after hour, day after day, until he felt pointless and frustrated with himself, when he looked at himself and introspected for a while. He had begun writing down the skills he had always admired in any person, from talents to physique, everything. At the end of a few minutes, he had written down skills like speaking confidently in front of people, and knowledge of the entertainment business. After admiring his list for a while, he had realised he had no idea about any of them. He had been living a dream all this while, in reality, where he was worth nothing, bearing no marketable skill, and yet he had been expecting some sort of divine intervention, which would shower him with resources from dreamland.
All his ego, his feeling of sorry for himself and frustration vanished into thin air. He had found the insight, the answer he was seeking for finally, that he was worth nothing, just an entitled privileged parasite, sucking off the blood of his hard-working guardians, who probably looked at him like their god blessed blue-eyed baby, supposed to be protected from the harshness of the outside world, for his own good of course. The fact etched itself to his heart, that he was nothing, equivalent to a tiny speck of dust in the universe, or probably not even worth that much. He felt more pathetic than shit itself, which in retrospect did have some uses, unlike himself. He cursed himself so much that he laughed whenever he thought about himself these days, just a naive immature kid who had thought resources of commercial value would be handed over to him without creating any value first.
It had been hard to make changes at first. He had begun to read one page of the newspaper everyday, and to his horror, he realised that it was fun. How could he have missed out on reading about political affairs when he had had the time to binge on Instagram for hours on end, which had wrecked his sleep schedule and caused him to wake up near afternoon everyday? The first day he had tried to sleep early, he couldn’t, ending up rolling and tossing about on the bed, until he got up and rolled a thick blunt of marijuana to help with a peaceful sleep. It worked. Since that day, reorganizing his sleep schedule had become one of the most important things he had ever done in his life. He had no idea how his mind had begun resisting the pull of his smart phone, and uninstalled his social media apps to boot. Restlessness gripped him for days. His entire habit cycle was being crushed right before his eyes. He felt he was being saved from the mediocre.
It became harder in the second week. He relapsed, horribly, uncontrollably, he felt he was being programmed to act on someone else’s behalf. He was trying to get back control, when he realised it was too late to have any significance. Time that was supposed to be spent doing push ups and reading a few pages, was lost, to never return. What horrified him was, he repeated his old actions of wasting his time on consuming non-constructive media for the next five days and ended the week by sleeping in till late afternoon, post which his father had asked him if he was all right. He had wanted to scream, that no, he wasn’t.
That night, he had a dream where he had transformed himself into a bird, flying high and above the reach of mankind, only to be shot down to his falling death. Sweating profusely, he had woken up, and made a motion for his smart phone when he stopped himself, closed his eyes and began to imagine the dream again. It flashed in front of his eyes, him being shot down brutally, dead even before he hit the ground at breakneck speed.
He connected the dream to his own life, and noticed by the weather outside that it was the crack of dawn.
Smiling, he began to do push ups.
Marijuana Maharaj 