Inception

A few nights back I had the weirdest of dreams. I wake up from sleep inside my dream in a strange building. And in front of it is a huge and very ancient multi-storied temple with the ground floor housing the temple pond.. unlike any I had seen before. I wonder why I am there. I look around and find a number of others waking up all through the building that I am in and asking each other the same question. They are all bewildered as to why they are here and how they got here. Someone suggests we contact Swamiji Nithyananda but we are not able to reach him.. and someone else says that the rumor is that he is on the way to here as we speak.

I then walk through the temple and suddenly a thought strikes me that perhaps this is a dream. I try to find out some anomaly around me but can't find any. I meet someone in the temple and ask him if this is a dream. He tells me that it is. And I ask him, "If it is a dream, why does it feel so real?".. and he does not reply and says, it is just so. I continue on my unsuccessful quest to figure out why this is a dream and not real. I touch the walls of the temple and everything around me and they feel solid. I can feel my breathing. This can't be a dream I say. I spent a bit of time after that wandering around and feeling the reality of the place. I then get home and meet my son Surya. I ask him the same question and he too replies that this is a dream. I ask him for the reason and he says that it just felt so. Then I sense someone enter the house and suddenly in mid sentence, I wake up!

My entire dream and the quest is so fresh in my memory - as was the realization of who I was and the fact that I had indeed been dreaming. That moment of waking up is strongly etched in my memory. A mixture of amazement and unexpectedness - almost an anti-climax. I was trying to figure out in the dream whether I was dreaming or not.. but I could never imagine what waking up would be like. I wonder if this is what the enlightenment experience would feel like.

I wonder...