Last Friday night I had the most curious dream. The curious bit had little to do with the surreal imagery that most dreams usually consist of. Instead, it was the thought process of the dream’s main protagonist (me) that was intriguing.

It was one of those dreams that keep slipping to and fro from being regular to nightmarish, from the ‘normal’ to becoming riddled with anxious images and emotions. But the bit I most clearly remember about the dream is me being driven to my office by my late father (who passed away in 2009).

In the dream I’m in a plain t-shirt and jeans, looking (and feeling) like I used to in my 20s: Lean, agile and a swift walker; no ‘pot belly’ or that stoic post-40 calm.

I often dream about my father, to whom I was very close. Perhaps my mind has yet to accept his passing away. Nevertheless, in the dream he drops me in a busy area full of traffic and shops, and where lots of construction work is taking place.

I get off, and that is when I realise I am carrying a black knapsack. This is strange because I have always hated knapsacks. Even when I travel across Asian and European cities and walk for hours, I refuse to carry one. So I wonder what the knapsack symbolised in the dream? Some sort of a burden or a worrying thought, perhaps?

Well, I get off the car, bid goodbye to my father and as I walk towards my ‘office’ I come across a huge mound of rubble near a construction site. The sight saddens me because (in my dream) the rubble is of a cinema that has been torn down.

As I walk towards the office I decide to eat at a roadside restaurant.

I eye a café that is serving barbeque dishes. It’s one of those congested eateries one comes across in Karachi’s Burns Road area. So as I move towards it I suddenly realise I do not have the knapsack hanging from my shoulders anymore. I panic.

Being chronically absent-minded, it’s the kind of rapid (but quiet and non-vocal) panic I usually feel when I forget my wallet, mobile phone, keys or whatever, usually in situations where the mind is more focused on thoughts that seem more overwhelming and occupying than other, if I may say so, more trivial matters.

In the dream, struck by the sudden realisation that I had misplaced the knapsack, I quickly turn around and swiftly start retracing the path I had already taken. On the way I remember that I had put the knapsack near the rubble (while mourning the fallen cinema).

As I meaningfully and urgently walk back towards the rubble, I am convinced that in such a congested area (and that too in a city like Karachi), someone must have already run away with the bag.

Now comes the most intriguing part of the dream: To counter the thought of someone running away with a mistakenly abandoned knapsack, I actually begin to hope that nobody would have gone near it, believing it to be a mysterious and unattended knapsack containing an explosive device.

Yes, in other words, I count on the fear of getting caught up in an indiscriminating, mass act of violence that Pakistanis have been suffering from for over a decade now, to become a deterrent of sorts, stopping someone from picking up my knapsack.

I reach the area and there it was, sitting under the ugly shadow of the rubble. But near the bag stood a man in a white shalwar-kameez, sporting a huge moustache. He looks at me approaching the bag, and as I am about to pick it up he says: ‘Iss mein toh kitaben hain’, (But there are just books in it). He sounds almost disappointed. That’s also when I woke up.

Since the waking up bit had not left the dream stranded like a nerve-wrecking cliff-hanger, I didn’t feel anxious. The fact that I had managed to find my knapsack, the dream seemed to have resolved whatever anxiety I might have been feeling before I went to sleep.

But I kept thinking about how my mind had used a fear as a tool to reason out and cancel another fear.

In other words, in the dream I was hoping that the fear of mass destruction stops anyone from committing a petty theft. This is how my mind was dealing with the anxiety of losing something that I was afraid of losing — using the thought of one kind of fear to negate the thought of another.

But who was the man? He must have checked the knapsack to know that there were just books in it. Was he a cop or a possible thief? He was obviously not afraid of approaching an unattended knapsack lying there near a heap of rubble in a congested area of Karachi. Perhaps he was the manifestation of what my mind was attempting: i.e. trying to use one fear to keep in check the anxiety over another fear. Is that how we exist now? Does our survival in this country now depend on how we navigate through various sets of fears? Daunting thought.

Maybe this particular dream was a way for my unconscious mind to figure out what my conscious mind is always trying to determine. Things like: what makes so many Pakistanis repress the fear (and the fact) of mass violence with a kind of reasoning that sees terrorism as something that happens to other people; or as an act that has some kind of a rational justification behind its devastating intent.

The dream might also be trying to answer how some men actually use such a fear of unhinged violence to their own advantage.

Most of all, what intrigued me most was how in my dream a national issue (terrorism) became linked to a somewhat trivial personal issue. The conclusion (perhaps) being that things like extremist violence and terror is no more an issue outside our area of immediate concerns. Pakistanis may now actually be going about their daily lives with thoughts and behavioural patterns that are unconsciously being driven by the constant fear of indiscriminate violence. This should also explain why we say what we say.