She stared long and hard. It was the weirdest piece of earring she had seen anyone wear. She was sure she hasn’t seen anything weirder than that. Not even that spiky hair style that leaves no more than 4 strands of hair standing out in four different directions. It was huge, plain black, going all the way up from the hole in the bottom lobe of the ear, through the back and finally arching down through a hole in the upper lobe. Overall, it looked like some sort of cornucopia. From a certain angle it even seemed like a natural (and rather ugly) appendage of the ear. Technically it was an ear ornament - it just wasn't serving its exact purpose - that of ornamenting the ear. The sudden jerk put an end to this inner monologue. This is where she had to get off. She threw one final glance at the man with the weird black earring to confirm she wasn’t dreaming. After all, wasn’t she used to seeing weird stuff only in dreams. Her own ‘real’ life was anything but weird - it was ordered and imperfectly perfect.

She preferred her dreams. She dreamed of living in her dreams - where randomness was the order of the day; where there were no real or imaginary constraints; where life was time & spaceless; where she could have seen the same man with the same weird earring and not found it weird. But, what if she already was? What if her real life was just a long and repetitive set of dreams, lucid dreams? What if she was flitting in and out of these sets of dreams; the ones she calls real and the others - dreams?

Yes, it has to be that! Life has to be a series of dreams tacked together. That fits in with her belief that nothing is real or everything is! She suddenly caught her reflection, smiling. The thought that she herself must be ‘the weirdo’ in some one else’s pattern of dreams, turned the sly smile to a grin!