Meaning......?

  

I was rudely woken up early this morning. I hadn’t slept well for weeks and was enjoying a rather rare, luxuriously deep sleep, when I heard a loud door bell. It was so distinctive that, even though I did hesitate momentarily, I said to myself it must have rung and I wasn’t imagining it. I was deep in comforting slumber but I don’t think I was dreaming. I cannot remember the reverie or that the bell ringing had any connection with a fictive event that was occurring in that altered state of consciousness. 

Strangely though, I often hear door bells early in the morning. They usually are, or turn out to be illusory and sound much like the one I had in my apartment on the eight floor in Palam Vihar, Gurgaon. The apparatus had been fixed in the kitchen and I almost never heard it if I was in the bedroom or any other parts south or north of the kitchen, separated by a spacious drawing and dining area. Especially if two or three of the interconnecting doors were shut. I would often end up assuming someone had rung or I had missed hearing it, and this usually happened in my sleep, in the early morning. 

I am not a late riser, but I spend the morning in meditation and healing work and therefore I didn’t like the staff disturbing me when they came in. So I would open the door before they came, leaving it on the latch so that they could enter easily enough, without troubling me. Although habitually, they rang the bell to let me know they had arrived for duty. And in the silence of the earlier hour I would usually hear it. The problem wasn’t in the morning, unless I had forgotten to do the opening ritual, but during the day, when I was understaffed and left alone in the flat while Mahipal went out for chores. Either way, I started conjuring up door bells in my sleep. 

I moved to Goa about four years ago but I still hear the doorbell. I assume it is a hangover from ten years of apprehension that I hadn’t heard it ring and Mahipal would call me on my mobile to say “madamji aapne darwaza nahin khola”. If that was on silent mode, he would call the landline. And if I had switched that off, he would go back down to the guard room and have them buzz me on the intercom. It was quite a palaver. 

My apartment in Siolim is tiny compared to the one I had in Gurgaon. The bell is barely two feet from the only interconnecting door, which is my bedroom. There never is any doubt in my mind that I can hear it and the tone is very different to the one I had in Gurgaon. When the bell rang this morning it was so clear, that even though I did pause to consider I may have imagined it, I still got myself out of bed. By now I have forgotten what the bell in Gurgaon sounded like. On hindsight I think that the pitch I heard this morning wasn’t anything like the current bell tone of my Goa apartment chime but, it was loud and well-defined, leaving no doubt in my mind that a bell had indeed rung. In my sleepy state I wasn’t about to analyse jingles – it didn’t even occur to me then. 

Last evening after my beach walk, as I strolled towards my apartment from the parking lot, I noticed a new guard inside the kiosk at the gate. I leaned in to verify and he introduced himself saying that he has been doing night duty since the 27th of August. He was barely two weeks into his charge which made me briefly consider that maybe there was a problem and therefore he was waking me at what seemed like an unearthly hour. I didn’t open the door, but looked through the peephole and there was no-one visible. The peephole gives me a zoomed in view of much of the corridor and there was absolutely no sign of life. The first floor passageway electric lights were on and I was groggy enough to think it must be some unearthly hour and I had just dreamt it all. However when I went to pee, and glanced at the bathroom window, I could see light peeping in through the shadowy and dense mesh of coconut fronds and bamboo leaves. It wasn’t daylight, but neither was the sky the dark of midnight blue, but a sort of mildly diluted indigo. The birds had started their morning chorus of greeting daylight, so although I didn’t have my watch on me, I knew it was close to sunrise. 

My wrist watch hasn’t been working since the lock-down started and I have no idea if the Titan showroom in Goa is open. I am also fed up with this timepiece because they have replaced it once, repaired it another time and it still doesn’t work. I am extremely disappointed by this inferior quality of merchandise from Titan, so I have almost given up on wearing a watch since March this year. It lies on a chest of drawers on my way out of the apartment to remind me that I need to take it into the showroom, for it is still under warranty. But, the long and short of it is that I had no idea what time it was until I got back to my room and checked the phone. It was close to 5 am or maybe later, I have forgotten. Apparently sunrise was at 6.22 am today, so maybe it was closer to six in the morning. Anyhow, time aside, I was desperate to get back to sleep and thought why would I rouse myself like this when I had slept after 1 am and had been struggling to sleep for weeks. The end result was that I overslept, which was annoying because there is a lot that I want to do and a sleep-deprived body or mind doesn’t let me work to my optimum. And the already precarious sleep cycle gets further skewed, adding to my angst. 

In all these years, I have never checked on-line or otherwise, for why I have these recurring episodes of door bells ringing in the wee hours of morning. But peeved by why I would rouse myself from much needed sleep I decided to check if there was something I was trying to tell me. 

As a healer, I do card readings for my clients and know that we basically have the answers but are just wary of acknowledging what we think, afraid that the truth of our feelings may rock the boat. Often we are just tired and need hope. So, I don’t generally see any messages that I may draw from what I read on-line or elsewhere, as anything other than what I need to know, what I need to see and understand regarding the obfuscated inner tapestry. Sometimes it may take me into deeper appreciation of scientific and psychological principles of life, but today, I was looking to know what my mind was rousing me to recognize. I knew that there was a lot to be done and no time to dawdle in bed, but that is exactly what I ended up doing which infuriated me. Since I had done the converse of what the wake-up call had possibly intended, I decided to read what experts said about door bells ringing in your sleep. 

One site narrated a Japanese woman’s story where she had such recurring dreams – she too heard early morning doorbells frequently, so I read through it with interest. On this night that she wrote about she woke up and went to the door and, like me, looked through the peephole, but she thought she had seen a cat flash past. Being a feline lover, she opened to door to bring the lost creature in, but instead of finding the pussycat, she said that “the porch light flickered out and a cold gust of air seemed to pass straight through me into my apartment. The light came back on instantly and the whole thing can’t have lasted more than a second……I could have sworn to god that I felt something push me through the door” Adding that it was a warm night in Japan where they just needed light blanket, but the chill was so sharp she had to take a hot bath and then cuddle up in bed with many warm layers to take the chill out of her body. The next day, she even found a hand print on the back of her white T-shirt, of “fingers longer than anything she had ever seen…..black and smudged, like someone’s hand had been covered in coal or ash.” Some of the responses to this story, said that she had let a spirit in and that there was little that could be done now. 

Honestly, I don’t know how much of such things I can believe. I have a adequately rational side to my mind, even as it is also rather creative and inventive, but I don’t know anything about spirits ringing doorbells to enter your domain in this eerie way. I do recognize that there are energetic beings around us that help us connect with ourselves and we are all essentially linked by energy which transmits the frequency of thought and feeling. So we can pre-empt someone calling us, or think of someone and they will visit and that ilk. That our intuitive, inner voice can also lead us to people and events which will take us forward with what we want to do and wish to know. There is a lot about the spiritual world that is tangible in that sense, but I have no experience of spirits, and this kind of complication is the last thing I needed right now, so I thanked my luck that I hadn’t opened the door and continued with my search. 

But then, I back-tracked to re-read what she had written. And at the very outset of the article, the lady who went by the name of 'Shiishibou' on www.reddit.com, shared her curiosity of wondering what might be on the other side of the door – when she heard these early morning rings. She wrote: “Although I haven’t read much about it, I am aware of the studies on there being different planes of existence in our world. What if the doorbell ringing isn’t in our waking/living world, but in another?” With this thought “bugging” her no end, she said that she just had to check it out that night, for “the sake of my sanity.” The plan had been “to check the door, see nothing, prove my stupid brain wrong and go back to blissful sleep.” But things didn’t go as planned. And yet, didn’t they? I mean she was curious about the other dimension of our world and the energies around her showed her what she wanted to know, isn’t it just as simple as that? Whether or not spirits exist, if we believe they do – even if we want to disprove it to feel more comforted by the known, then it’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy? 

So, what was going on with me, that I didn’t understand, except that curiosity about spirits or parallel universes wasn’t quite what I had in mind. I found another article in the Sunday Tribune written by one Vinaya K. Manhas who said that based on the religious inclination, of the person dreaming of the ringing bells, the meaning was different. so According to Indian thought it was auspicious but according to western precepts it was ominous. And that psychologically speaking this indicated our need for other people’s approval and even this was culturally linked. He then narrated a story of a woman who often heard the door bell ring in her dream, but would not see anyone at the door. It seemed that the reverie was indicative of her desire to get in touch with someone, to meet them physically, but the absence of anyone at the other side of the door was analysed as her realization that it was fruitless to expect that person come meet her.  

So, either way, both women had something on their mind and their dreams answered this through some searching and analyzing, but all I had gone to sleep with was stress of how much there was I wanted to achieve in life and that there always seemed too little time. I was getting fed up of not sleeping enough and just not managing to do all that I wanted to do. The bell probably was a wake-up call that I didn’t heed because I love my sleep, is what I am inclined to conclude with, but there were other sites that cited death calling and that made me think of my ageing mother alone in Delhi, who had just fallen off her bed. I had also been thinking about the day my father died over 30 years ago and this did spook me for a while but my rational mind reclaimed its space and told me that why would I need forewarning of anything? Surely things would unfurl as life does and we have to face them? If someone is to die, a perfectly natural event in all our lives, why would I need to be forewarned? 

But all of this, then took me into another realm – that of finding meaning in life. Why do we want to attribute meaning to things that have no correlation to our present circumstance and existence? Is it an escape from the now, a means to avoid the discomfort of the present, or is there meaning to everything that occurs, beyond what is unfolding? I am a great one for finding meaning in little things that draw my attention and generally this leads to more expansive discernment of myself and the universe I inhabit, which can be a fascinating way to live. However, there are occasions when I find it infuriating to take out time to tabulate all what I research and find that all it does, is gives me the courage to do what I already know I want to do.