A Waking Dream

I woke up  in the middle of the night and saw a colourful floral tattoo projected on my wall from the night lights outside my window projecting through the thigh of a guy sitting on the shelves above my bed.

I knew it was a guy, without need to see nor seek to find one actually sitting on the shelves, a ridiculous thought even as it was; and I even knew his name. It also did not occur to me that unless the thigh was translucent I ought to see a shadow and not the colorful floral tattoo. In reality the tattoo was the wall clock sitting just inside the shadows with only its edge in the light.

Then I saw a bat hovering on my ceiling over an unchanging spot. Its was fluttering its wings utterly silent and most rapidly, even more rapid than a hummingbird's. I thought I ought to hear the air moving, fanned as it were by the rapid wings. But I heard nothing. It was utter silence.

Now I did not mind the guy sitting on my shelves but the bat was a different matter. It had to go.

After some time, straining my eyes in the dark, watching it and its mesmerising ultra silent rapid fluttering wings, I decided I had to get out of bed and go behind it, and to scare it to fly away from me through the open windows. I did that and switched on the bathroom lights on the other side, and lo and behold, the bat disappeared completely, instantly, and without any clues how it so vanished.

I started looking around and saw the spot the bat was hovering was actually the ceiling light. It however did not cross my mind, yet again, to see who and whether anyone was actually sitting on my shelves, nor was I yet aware that such a notion can only be complete fantasy. My only concern was how the bat disappeared so suddenly and completely. Confounded, I switched off the bathroom lights and went back to bed.

And looking at the ceiling where the bat was, this time I noticed that the "bat" was actually a reflection on the ceiling lights.

And I woke up from my waking dream; and knew I had just made a fool of myself.

On reflection later in daylight hours, I  surmised that in dreams we believe anything and everything, no matter how fantastical, and perhaps because we were conditioned from many many dreams, many of which were the concatenation of incoherent bits of experiences, actually experienced, or thought or imagined, deliberately or otherwise, creating absurd sequences of dream episodes. And the mind do not judge whether such sequences are real or not. Perhaps it knew it was only a dream.

But in this episode my mind was still asleep, in dream mode, when I opened my eyes and saw the tattoo and the bat instead of the wall clock and the ceiling light.