THE PALACE BEHIND NEELU’S EYES

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In the village of Sonbari there lived a girl named Neelu.

Neelu did not like to sleep. “Sleeping is a waste,” she told her grandmother.

“I shut my eyes. The night goes away. Nothing happens.”

“Nothing happens?” said her grandmother. “Child, your head is busier at midnight than at noon.”

Neelu did not believe her. That night she lay down and decided to catch the night at its work. She kept her eyes open a long time. Then, without noticing, she stopped.

When she looked again, she was standing at the top of a wide stone staircase. A small grey owl sat on the railing. His feathers were untidy. His eyes were very awake.

“I am Bhoora,” he said. “I take children down.”

“Down where?”

“Into your own head,” said the owl. “You are asleep in Sonbari. This palace is a picture of what your brain is doing while you lie there.”

“A picture of what?”

“That is the interesting part,” said Bhoora. “Come. I will show you the picture. Then I will tell you the true thing behind it. A picture without the true thing is only a decoration.”

So they went down together. The first step was easy. Neelu still heard a dog barking far away. By the fourth step she heard nothing at all. Her legs felt heavy and lovely.

“This is the deep floor,” said Bhoora.

Along the walls, small quiet workers were mending things. One stitched a scraped knee. One straightened a bone and made it a little longer. One carried tiredness away in a bucket.

“Now the true thing,” said Neelu. “You promised.”

Bhoora looked pleased. “When you fall asleep, you do not go straight to dreaming,” he said. “First you sink into deep sleep. Your breathing slows. Your body goes soft.”

“And then?”

“Then your body starts repairing itself. It releases a special juice called growth hormone. That is how you grow taller in the night and not in the daytime. Cuts close faster. The parts of you that fight illness get stronger.”

“The menders are the growth hormone?”

“The menders are the picture,” said Bhoora. “The growth hormone is the true thing. Now hold on. The stairs are going up.”

They came up into a hall full of light. The hall was enormous. Lamps burned everywhere. It was as busy as a market at noon.

“But it is midnight,” said Neelu.

“Look at the lamps and remember them,” said Bhoora. “Your brain does not switch off when you sleep. During this part of the night, it burns almost as bright as it does when you are awake. Some parts burn brighter.”

“Then why does my body look dead?”

“Only one thing gives you away,” said the owl. “Your eyes. Under your closed eyelids, they flick from side to side, very fast. Doctors watched sleeping people, saw this, and gave the whole thing a name. They call it REM sleep. R.E.M, it stands for Rapid Eye Movement.”

“Rapid Eye Movement,” said Neelu, trying it out.

“That is the name of the room you are standing in,” said Bhoora. “This is where dreams are made.”

In the middle of the hall stood an elephant with paint on her trunk. She was painting the walls. She painted from a heap on the floor. Neelu looked at the heap. It was her own day. The broken slate from school. The smell of her mother’s kitchen. The neighbor’s yellow dog. The fear she felt when the teacher called her name.

“You are painting from my day,” said Neelu. “Why can you not paint something new?”

“Because I have nothing else,” said the elephant. “Your brain cannot invent a face it has never seen. Not one. Every face in every dream you will ever have is a face you have looked at, or two faces mixed together.”

“Then dreams are just leftovers.”

“Dreams are what filing looks like from inside,” the elephant said. “There is a small, curled part of your brain shaped like a seahorse. It is called the hippocampus. All day it holds your new memories in a heap, the way I hold this one. At night it hands them over for proper keeping.”

“And the painting?”

“The painting is the noise the work makes,” she said.

“You do not dream and then file. You file, and dreaming is what you see while it happens. That is why children who sleep before a test remember more than children who stay up.”

Neelu watched her own afternoon dry on the wall. The school had already grown a golden roof. Then a tiger walked out of the painting.

Neelu turned to run. Her legs did not move

A thin silver rope was tied round her ankles. It ran to a gatekeeper by the door, holding the other end.

“Untie me!”

“Certainly not,” said the gatekeeper. “Your body is lying on a bed in Sonbari. There is a small switch at the bottom of your brain, just above your neck. The moment you begin to dream, it switches your arms and legs off.”

“Why?”

“Because you are about to run from a tiger,” said the gatekeeper.

“If your legs were listening, you would run into the wall. Every dreamer is switched off this way. Every night. I hold all the ropes.”

The tiger came closer. It was very large and smelled of wet stone. Neelu could not run. So she stood still and looked at it. And when she looked properly, she saw that its eyes were her teacher’s eyes. The tiger stopped, sat down like a cat, yawned, and went back into the wall.

“Well done,” said Bhoora.

“That was horrible.”

“That was practice,” said the owl. “There is a part of your brain that handles fear. In here it wakes right up, while the careful, sensible part goes quiet. So, you get frightened, badly, in a place where you are tied to the floor and nothing can touch you.”

“Nobody asked me if I wanted practice.”

“Nobody asks a tiger cub either,” said Bhoora. “It still learns to pounce on its mother’s tail.”

After that the lamps went low. The staircase came back and carried her down to the menders. Then up. Then down. Then up.

“Why do we keep going round?”

“Because you need both floors, many times,” said Bhoora. “Down for mending, up for sorting. One turn of the wheel takes about ninety minutes. You will do four or five turns before the morning”

Neelu noticed that each time they came up, the hall was busier and she stayed longer. Near morning she stayed almost an hour, and the elephant painted a whole city.

“Early in the night, most of your sleep is deep sleep,” said the owl. “Later, most of it is dreaming. So your longest and strangest dream is always the last one, just before you wake. That is why people wake in the middle of the finest story.”

At the end the owl walked her to a door. Beside it sat an old woman with an ink pot, fast asleep. Her pen had rolled away. “Wake her,” said Neelu. “She is meant to write down what I saw.” “She sleeps all night. She always has,” said Bhoora. “Remember the seahorse part that files your memories?

While you dream, it is busy with the day’s heap. It is not saving the dream itself.”

“So I lose everything?”

“Within about five minutes of opening your eyes, nearly all of it,” said the owl. “Unless you lie still and go over it at once. Then a scrap stays.”

Neelu opened her eyes. Grey light. Her own quilt. A rooster shouting about the sun.

She did not sit up. She lay very still and went over it, the way the owl had said.

The palace stayed. An elephant. A golden roof. A rope around her ankles. And the feeling of standing in front of something enormous and not running away.

Outside, the neighbour’s yellow dog lay asleep in the dust.

His paws were twitching. His eyes were moving quickly under his eyelids. Neelu crouched down beside him.

“Rapid Eye Movement,” she told him.

The dog dreamed on, and did not answer, and she went in for her breakfast.