bhaskar saikia

There is a strange comfort in reality. It unfolds in a line, one moment connecting to the next, a steady thread that gives us a sense of continuity. We wake up in the morning, recall what we did yesterday, plan for tomorrow—and in doing so, our memories bind our existence into something coherent.

Dreams, however, are different. They are fragments—shards of memory, emotion, and imagination, stitched together with little regard for sequence or logic. In one moment, you are standing in your childhood home; in the next, you are on an unfamiliar street in a distant city. Faces blur, timelines collapse, and yet it all feels strangely natural while you are within it.

This difference—between the linearity of reality and the fragmentary nature of dreams—exists largely because our memories hold reality together. They give events context, a before and an after, a reason and a result.

But what happens when memory itself slips away? When the past dissolves into patches of forgotten faces and nameless places, does waking life feel any different from a dream? For someone who has lost their memories, reality might itself appear fragmented, disconnected, and elusive.

It makes me wonder—are dreams and reality truly separate, or is their difference just an illusion built by memory? Without memory, perhaps everything is a dream—shifting, uncertain, and without order.

Today, this thought stayed with me: maybe what we call “reality” is simply a dream we remember better.