Pink candy

At first, there is nothing. Or probably a delicate haze, like being in a fog. Slowly, an outline emerges. Hey, this is interesting. As the fog lifts, by degrees, the form becomes clearer and excitement mounts. At some point, the form acquires recognition and gets a name. Quite suddenly, it is crystal clear, unmistakable, undeniable. It's a candy ! A pink one at that ! Aha, joy beams onto you as you reach out for the candy, eyes glittering, grin pasted and soft music cooing in the background. You are almost there, candy is just within reach, when a large hand appears out of nowhere and in one swift brutal unjust motion snatches it away from you.

The cruelty of the act takes a moment to register. At the same moment, you recognize the hairy monster that snatched the candy - it's your father ! The cruelty and the recognition converge rapidly onto a point and you yell out a cry, a deep piercing cry.

Your mom comes running in. "What happened dear, were you dreaming?". Amidst your tears, you manage to blurt out "candy". This irritates the mom. "First thing in the morning, you want a candy...go brush your teeth". Uff, she doesn't understand.  This makes you sob more. Mom softens a bit and takes you in her arms. Reassured, you say, "pink candy". "Not now...", she starts saying. There she goes again. You start crying again, but manage to say "Appa took my pink candy" (and that's your first full sentence of the day!). "Oh, your father took your pink candy in your dream?", mom summarises, cuddles you for comfort, and simultaneously calls out for the culprit.

The father, oblivious to his crime, walks in, sees you awake and chirps in "Good morning". You don't respond, and he finds two pairs of accusing eyes staring back at him with a penetrating gaze. "Where is the pink candy?", mom demands. "What pink candy?", he asks. Ouch, wrong question. Not only does he snatch away the candy, now he is what-pink-candying you. Indeed! You start crying. "The one you took from her", mom declares, with an increasing intensity in her voice. Before he could respond, she adds for his benefit, "...in her dreams".

"Aha", says the father, uncertainties cleared, and now on terra firma. "You know what the pink candy told me?". You stop crying and get mildly interested. "It told me that it will wait for a little girl". He then picks you up from your mom. Her job done, mom returns back to her chores. Dad continues, "Pink candy told me that it will wait for the little girl who brushes and showers first".

And thus, the task of preparing you for the day, which normally takes anywhere between 10-100 minutes, gets completed in record time.

Of course, when you are ready, the pink candy is ready too and waiting for you :)
  

Alphabet Dreams

Very early in the morning, 3 AM to be precise, Daivik got seriously interested in err... alphabets. Apparently he was just dreaming about "alphabets" and his eagerness to share the dream happened to be, well, timeless. With hard-to-curtail enthusiasm dancing on the sleep-defying eyes, he announced, "appa, I was dreaming about this alphabet". And using his finger as pencil, he started tracing the contours of the alphabet on an imaginary sheet of paper in front of him. Even as he was 'drawing' the alphabet, he remembered another one. Furiously he rubbed out the previous one from the 'paper' and redrew the new one, only to erase it and draw another one. After a few moments, his movements started resembling a sword fight, or more realistically, a 3AM attempt to evade a recalcitrant fly. Evidently he was having difficulties in getting the alphabet right. I'm not sure if it was the frustration of not remembering the correct alphabet from the dream or the lack of a commensurate skill  in portraying it correctly, or the tussle with an instinct that was screaming get-back-to-sleep-now, the enthusiasm slowly gave way to a whimper and hands still raised mid air and pointing at the 'paper', he drifted back to sleep. Most amazingly, when he got up in the morning-morning, he remembered the dream again, and started writing on his 'paper' right away !

I was taken back to another time, maybe 3 years ago. Daivik was making the fascinating discovery that the sounds he was learning to make, consciously, distinctively and reproducibly, actually carried meaning. They were not randomly generated noise but indeed denote something. He was mentally cataloging these sounds and associating them with objects. It was a charmingly transparent process that was absolutely mesmerizing to watch : every now and then a new word will grab his attention, he will become concentration-focus personified as we point out to the object the word denotes. Usually he will repeat the word once or twice and look at or feel the object. That's it. A sound becomes a word and suddenly acquires a meaning, the transformation is complete. Now, as words gets more abstract, the process becomes more complicated. One fine day, night rather, 3AM (again!), he sat bolt upright and started reciting all the 'words' he knew at that point.

Perhaps the same mental processes are in operation again, as he is perched on the cusp of another exciting discovery. Just as sounds becomes words and gets an identity, shapes are becoming alphabets that fill up the books !

I wonder about the 3AM connection, though :)