My great-grandfather says this: everyone kept paying me visits to thank and appreciate me for saving the royal heir with my magical craft. In fact, I only owe them my thanks for giving me an opportunity to sharpen my book knowledge that was lying unused for long and give it a fresh appeal. When I think about my hard-learnt, wonderful art that could penetrate one’s sleep to see their dreams had been used to save the royal heir from meeting her end, I am really proud of having realised the fullest use of it. I take this opportunity to extend my regards to the king’s wife, who set aside all the hatred and disbelief that everyone had for my words by having immense faith in my craft and giving me full freedom to use it. Now, I start telling the story as she ordered me to do so:
The eccentric disease that our king’s daughter got infected with was only the resultant effect of mischievous bad dreams. The medical scriptures say that the bad dreams can only threaten one’s healthy mind and body but can’t destroy it. Those bad dreams can only take advantage of the weakness of those bodies and minds affected by the misalignment of actuality and dominate them. The king’s daughter was affected simultaneously by a bad dream (How could we say it was a bad dream?) and a weird manifestation of reality that got unimaginably aligned with those dreams. The reason behind its eccentricity was that the manifestation of reality she had experienced outside was, in fact, the dreams of another living being. It was just accidental that I found it out. I must thank God for that. If I hadn’t found that, I couldn’t have cured the king’s daughter with the defective knowledge in my craft, which was still limping to reach its fullest ability to penetrate the dreams. We shouldn’t call her disease a disease. It was a subtle indication of the future. I was unable to decode its signals. It may be associated with the destiny of the royal family. I sincerely believe that no one would be able to decode it. I don’t want to speak about it anymore. Let us talk about what had happened. (This was how my great-grandfather didn’t tell anyone his and the country’s destiny he had realised out of his love for the people and the king.)
My wife was aware of the fear and hesitation that had engulfed me that night I went out to see the king’s daughter’s dreams. None of the medical treatises I have mastered ever mentioned anything about anyone, including the physicians, entering the dreams of a young girl. I came to understand at that moment, to my shock, that all the art expositions had been silent about women’s dreams. With that, I had no hesitation to declare that the art in itself was defective. Only the good or bad effect I would be earning from this experience should be included in those treatises to serve as an antidote to this defect. The dreams of a young girl are very elegant. Secretive. They are as sacred as her virginity that only belongs to her. They possess incredible wonders, colours and scents. I still believe that anyone other than her, especially a man, would never get permission to see it. However, maybe due to some circumstances, I had been destined to see a woman’s dreams. Now, due to similar circumstances, I have been forced to tell that to everyone. I have come here to share my experience with the pure heart that this disclosure will help amend the existing scriptures and the women who are suffering from such diseases like her elsewhere in the world. I sincerely permit the sins for having done this to engulf me. Let the god forgive me.
Just like the dreams of any other young women in the world, the king’s daughter’s dreams were also about her male partner. Like any other young girl in the world, she was also very fond of having such dreams. When I got to know about her during my days with her, I understood from her discernment and the level of comfort that she had created her own image of her lover in her mind and he had been living with her for a long time. He was just as inevitable as death. His body parts looked imageless without specificity and with the quality of water that regains its shape from dissipation. But he was a very handsome man. Though it was not possible to view the beauty of his parts individually, his presence and the scent of the dreams were clearly telling that he was very handsome. How consciously these young handsome men who couldn’t be seen anywhere in the world are living happily in the dreams of women! But yet the reality remains that those handsome men wouldn’t be fit to live with their mortal body. Though that handsome man’s image looked smoky, his movements were tenacious. He entered through the right window of the king’s daughter’s bedroom with the weightlessness of a gentle breeze. No sooner had he entered the bedroom than the bed alone grew to ten times the size of the palace. The chariot-like bed of the king’s daughter assumed such a mammoth proportion that a chariot drawn by eight horses could run on it incessantly for two full days. The clouds and stars were travelling from one corner of the sky to another above the bed. The craftworks found on the things kept in the room evolved into separate items. The scent of the flowers grown in the room went beyond the dreams and spread outside. Since every tiny particle in the room grew multiple times, their natural hues put on the brightness and the heat of the sun, and had both of them roaming in the room bathed in sweat. The king’s daughter was cheerfully flying around with her lover in the space by creating such a splendid dream world for herself and mumbling the lines of some erotic songs in the room. His smoky form didn’t trouble her in any manner. She cuddled him with flesh and blood as if he were a real man. She kissed him on his lips, chest, navel, and below navel. Both of them shared most intimate, private teasing, which my ears might find offensive. The colours, the scents, the sound of laughter, the elegant waves of clothes amiably merged, and the celebratory howls that could wake the world up from its slumber had all assumed an immaculate purity in them. It was all because of my craft that I have been doomed to face this unfortunate time to tell all those untainted events that even God wouldn’t defile with His words.
***
They were playing ‘hide and seek’ and ‘blind man’s buff’ for a long time. At the end of each game, one hugged his or her enemies very tightly as a mark of victory over them. Every game they played had this as its target. I was in fact amused and at the same time happy to see them cuddling so tightly as if they could find only a tiny place in their palace of dreams—which was as big as a huge pristine forest—that didn’t have enough space for two people to play. After spending their time in the dreams, they returned to their bed. The king’s daughter lay on the cot at her usual place, stretching out her body, readying to sleep. Her friend emerged from under the cot, swirling, kissed her legs first, covered her with his kisses all over, and went near to her face. The eyes of the princess were teary and closed, with immeasurable peace, ecstasy, and expectation. Dear courtiers! It was at that time that something terrible that could tear open one’s heart happened! The unhappy incident that had been tormenting the king’s daughter at last happened. Her friend, who went very near to her face, suddenly spat out on her face. Within a second his smoky form got dissipated and disappeared. The spittle spat out from his extremely handsome face, having no blood and flesh, threw out the foul smell of the bad dream all over the room and was spilling like a thick white substance on the face of the king’s daughter. She woke up from her sleep out of utter shock, repugnance, and wretchedness. Not only that night, but I could understand on the very next night that all her dreams were ending every night that way. But the pitiable king’s daughter, who was waking up with shock, kept forgetting every night what she had seen in her dreams due to the aggression of her wake-up. Because of this, her friend—who spat out the spittle on her face the previous night—would come the next night and play with her as if nothing had happened; and she would permit him to play with her without any misgivings only to get her face smeared with spittle at the end of the game. This continued for long. He had kept spitting out on her face every night like the tip of a spear thrown at an improbable speed. This persistent shock got settled at the bottom of her heart, turned into a fear and repugnance towards handsome men, and eventually left this beautiful woman’s heart devastated. While the king’s daughter couldn’t understand the reason behind her eccentric behaviour, I was left seriously confused without knowing the cause behind her friend’s behaviour.
To be continued...
