Woke up before dream ended? Write your own ending !

Riyaz Masroor

Almost six weeks ago, when Kashmiris were in the middle of their ‘dream’, thirty-nine lawmakers from Indian parliament visited Kashmir amid mourning and a curfew-induced calm. As if the visit was to change the DNA of cops and troopers, the cycle of killings stopped. People got awakened before their dream would lead to the long cherished ending. Now, we are divided into two sets – one set regrets over the lost ending and the other wonders how to write the ending of our own, of course without again pulling over the quilt.

          Dreaming is easy but scripting your own ending if awakened halfway is a rarity. Charles de Gaulle in Europe and Muhammad Ali Jinnah in Asia aptly represent the quality of carrying forward the incomplete dream to a real-world ending. Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) too owes his literary success to an unfinished dream, which he later devoutly completed after throwing off his bedclothes. It’s an interesting story.

Having suffered almost two decades of failure, one night Stevenson had a terrible dream. Frightened by his outcries, his wife awakened him. “Oh, why did you wake me up?” he exclaimed, “I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.” He had just reached the moment of Dr. Jekyll’s first transformation and he was eager to see what manner of evil man might evolve before the sleep would be broken by his wife Fanny Osborne. But Stevenson employed his brilliant imagination and set out to write his own ending.

He wrote the first draft and threw it into fire after Fanny argued over the absence of metaphor; he began anew with appropriate allegory. Stevenson was so enthusiastic that he blended his dream with the conceived ending in next three days. The work came about as a novella, “Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. It is about a passionate, noble scientist who ventures into splitting his bad self and names it as “Mr. Hyde” but it is not long before the personality of Hyde begins to dominate Jekyll’s affairs.

This nineteenth century epic was an instant hit. The title later became part of the language, with the phrase “Jekyll and Hyde” implying a person who is vastly different in moral character from one situation to the next.

How Stevenson turned a dream-without-ending into an opportunity is a food for thought. History, geography or geopolitics apart, the idea of Freedom is after all a romance, a dream. We have been having this dream ever since long. When the dream was peaking, Sheikh Abdullah awakened us. He then chose to write his own ending in 1953. Baffled, he preferred sleep in 1975 and left the job of writing the ending of the dream to the next generation. Now, people again had a dream but they were awakened and are now being led to a “proper” ending. That ending will look “appropriate” and “genuine” as long as the dreamers don’t set out, like Stevenson, to write their own ending. How profound was Wordsworth when he said, “Great is the art of beginning but greater is the art of ending”