Last night I had a nightmare! While this might sound redundant, I see no other way of saying it. It was most horrific - that was its most salient feature. However, like most other nightmares, once I had been through its throes and emerged from sleep shaken, I still ended up like one of those earthlings in those movies in which the alien, when sending them back to earth, tell them with a snap of the finger, "You will remember nothing."

There are only two points about it that I remember most vividly. One was that the chief villain (maybe the only villain - I can't remember) was a most cruel woman who awakened more than the usual fear of God in me! In fact, I distinctly even remember saying at one point to myself, in one of those weird inexplicable phases in between consciousness and unconsciousness, but closer to the latter, that I never would have imagined a woman could scare me so much (feminists might find fault with even this, but that, sadly - for their sakes - cannot be helped).

It was truly a strange state of consciousness. I distinctly remember it even now, even though I cannot recall any other point about the nightmare (oh yes, to be absolutely honest, I also remember swimming at one point in a really dark pool outside an even darker house - the whole scene having a total sense of dread and grim foreboding about it - and waiting for impending doom). I was quite conscious at this point, from even an external point of view, that it was a nightmare, and a most terrifying one at that, but I was being dragged by a current too powerful to resist, sweeping me along in its deep dark churning. When I awoke, I know not when, I know I was relieved it was over.

Contrast this to another nightmare I had many nights ago, when I actually took the reins in my hands and turned the fast rolling nightmare away from its obvious grim inevitability, towards a safer - and happier - conclusion. I did this consciously, very much in possession of my faculties, yet I was in a state where I could not awake and break the dream abruptly. I will never understand completely how dreams work, but I will never cease to marvel at their mechanisms either.

My own humble explanation is that dreams and nightmares are a result of a heady combination of conscious, sub-conscious and unconscious experiences, and you have only a very minute control over them, through monitoring to a very small extent your conscious experiences. The fact that people generally cannot remember many of their dreams - though there are exceptions - is testimony to this. I have heard of an author who used to keep a pen and notebook by his bedside, and when he would awake, he would immediately note down what he had just dreamt, and use it as a plot for his next book, or maybe for the one after that .

My point though is, if only it was possible for nightmares, such as the one I had last night, to be directly transplanted from the mind onto the reel - just as it is and with no human editing involved. The nightmare I had last night had all the makings of a classic horror movie-cum-thriller, yet it was more classic than any other, and had a quality that cannot be described in human words or imagination. Such a movie would be a raw, unedited, truly surreal mix of the human with the supernatural - of the rational with the irrational - of things that can be explained with things that cannot.