Shamit Bagchi’s Dreamland Blurs the Line Between Myth and Machine

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Shamit Bagchi’s Dreamland: Twisted Tales from the Dream-Verse is a daring, kaleidoscopic collection that marries ancient myth and modern science into a single tapestry. Across its pages Bagchi transports us from dimly lit cremation grounds and secret tantric rituals to the humming laboratories of the future. The result is a series of tales that feel both timeless and prescient, as characters grapple with grief, desire, and identity – and as reality itself seems to bend and blur. Bagchi’s tone remains analytical and inquisitive, yet he never loses warmth: even amid ritualized eroticism or quantum paradoxes, his prose often feels like a storyteller speaking directly to you. The volume opens with a thoughtful foreword on Swami Vivekananda’s views of Tantra, immediately signaling that Bagchi is blending Eastern spiritual tradition into his speculative fiction. From there the reader meets a host of characters – a grieving youth, a lonely writer, a cloned politician, a quantum rogue – each journeying through a “dreamverse” where illusion (māyā) and reality are inseparable. This ambitious range can be dizzying, but Bagchi’s skill is in making even the wildest scenes feel coherent. By the end, Dreamland reads less like a random anthology and more like a mosaic: each piece distinct in style, yet all part of a grand, interconnected vision.

The Cosmic Lotus and the Veil of Illusion

The first section of Dreamland plunges us into a world steeped in Indian mysticism. We encounter stories woven around tantric ideas and folklore, where the veil of illusion is both literal and metaphorical. In the aptly named “Dakini: The Ninth Yogini of Māyā,” Bagchi introduces a lost young man (Mādhav or Jadob) wandering a Kali-vasuki cremation ground in Kolkata. He is haunted by grief over his mother’s death. From the darkness emerges the Dakini – a seductive goddess-dancer described in intoxicating detail (“hair flowed like unspooled shadow, tangled with bone beads…her eyes were cat-slit and endless”) – who challenges him to confront his sorrow. The ensuing ritual is graphic and trance-like: with words like “He entered her like a prayer uttered through cracked lips, not asking for salvation but for dissolution” the prose becomes almost surreal (see Dreamland, Chapter “Maithuna – The Sacred Union”). In this “sacred union,” blood and ash merge as the hero’s memory and ego literally burn away. It is a startling passage – part erotic drama, part spiritual allegory – that may shock some readers even as it drives home the collection’s core lesson. In the story’s aftermath, Bagchi includes a short “Philosophy in Flesh” epilogue that explicitly ties the vision to Tantra: “Tantra says the world is illusion – māyā – and the only truth is in embodied paradox”. This thesis is embodied in a final whisper to the hero: “Māyā is not your enemy. It is your lesson.”. In other words, the book’s mystical logic is that clinging to pain or to ego is the real trap; only by surrendering (through a violent union or spiritual death) does the soul awaken.

Bagchi reinforces these themes in other early tales. A second story, “The Embrace of Illusion,” continues the Dakini’s storyline: the grieving hero returns again to the cremation ground, and the goddess reappears to him, fully human and dangerous (“her form was no illusion now… Voluptuous like the goddesses of ancient temples – yet exuding danger, like a flame made flesh”). Again, image-heavy prose ties the erotic to the existential. Likewise, “A Tantric Ascension of the Bereaved” follows another mourner on the night-side of life. The prose here is equally vivid – Madhab walks where “jackals howl like grieving widows” and the air “tastes of burned marrow”. Within a few pages he too meets Dakini and undergoes a graphic Maithuna ritual. By climax’s end he literally “awoke with ash in his mouth and blood between his thighs” – a rebirth that transforms grief into enlightenment (this sequence closely parallels the one above).

What stands out in these myths is Bagchi’s willingness to dwell on the sensual and the cosmic at once. His metaphors – “red lotus blooming from ash,” the moon turning “crimson, as if blood had kissed its face” – give the stories a visceral power. Yet there is always a philosophical glaze: after each story ends, Bagchi often tacks on narrative commentary or ritual texts (as in the “Ritual of the Veiled Flame” in Dakini). These notes on Tantra, yoga and myth (some citing Bengali folk beliefs or even Swami Vivekananda) frame the events not as cheap thrills but as steps in a sacred journey. Through them, we sense a cultural lineage: the book draws on Kaula Tantra, Kali worship, even Aghora imagery. The mystical worldview (“māyā is that which binds and frees”) permeates every line. While the narrative can be intense – it toes the line of a pulp occult tale – Bagchi’s tone never feels mocking. Instead he writes as an enthusiast: it is clear he admires these traditions and wants us to understand their paradoxes. This lends an odd warmth to otherwise dark material: we trust the author, even as he shows us jackals and fire.

One of the strengths of these first stories is their emotional authenticity. Although the book touches on spiritual extremes, the characters’ feelings remain relatable. The young lover in the cremation ground is utterly raw in his grief: lines like “he had not eaten and not wept… something inside him was scorched into stillness”convey his pain plainly. We feel his longing and fear as he kneels before the goddess. When Bagchi writes, “You sought truth but carried pride” it is not just mystical banter – it reflects the character’s inner conflict. And by the end of each tale, the emotional payoff (surrender, release) is palpable. These parts of Dreamlandresonate like a good parable: after all the gore and ecstasy, we emerge with a deep (if unsettling) sense of catharsis.

Banku Babu and the Ghosts of Unfinished Stories

After these nocturnal rituals, Dreamland abruptly shifts gears. We are brought to a quiet apartment in Kolkata, where Banku Babu – retired archivist and aspiring writer – faces a very different kind of trial. The Banku Babu stories (spread across chapters “The Dispersal of Thought” through “The Final Clue”) are gentle, almost melancholic counterpoints to the earlier fury. Here the dream-logic is internal: Bagchi takes us inside an aging man’s mind. We learn that Banku yearns to write a detective novel but suffers from a curious affliction: his thoughts scatter like “migratory birds,” and he blames it “half-jokingly… on the ‘ghosts of unfinished pages’”. In beautifully measured prose, we accompany him through afternoons of indecision and small domestic intrusions – a creaking fan, the cock’s crow, a stray thought about a dust motes’ journey.

Bagchi’s portrayal of creative stall is both humorous and poignant. We see Banku fail gently at starting sentences (“He could begin a sentence… but somewhere between the spark of an idea and its execution, something would scatter”), and yet we also sense the noble persistence in his failure. There is a recurring lyricism: for example, an untitled poem appears mid-story, beginning “A pen held still is not yet lost; it listens first, it bears the cost of every thought that tried to soar… The dream not ended, only stilled”. Such lines are quietly moving and underscore one of the book’s subtle themes: that even in frustration or delay, creativity simmers beneath the surface. Banku’s chapters thus provide emotional resonance of a different sort – gentle hope amid ordinary life. The vivid descriptive language (dust motes like “a constellation of hesitations,” afternoon light tinted “burned turmeric”) attests that Bagchi’s style remains poetic.

Ultimately, Banku’s journey is a small triumph. In Chapter 3 (“The Emergence of Nripen Sanyal”), we see at last the moment he breaks through his block. The narrative registers it almost like lightning: Banku, stirring tea, whispers a name – “Nripen Sanyal, Goyenda” – and suddenly finds himself writing the opening lines of a detective story. Bagchi captures the wonder of that breakthrough: for the first time the “ghosts of unwritten books were silent” and the blank page was breached. The very next chapter shows Banku hunched over a cipher of his own making, utterly absorbed. We share his excitement as fiction comes alive. A great touch here is that Bagchi never makes the narrator cynical; the older writer remains affectionate to his world (his hunch of dusty routines and matchbox patterns) even as he conjures a mystery narrative.

Through Banku Babu’s story, Bagchi explores a different facet of dreaming: the dream of creation itself. Stylistically it contrasts the earlier tales. There is no overt magic, no goddess invoking. Instead, the author uses mundane details and gentle humor (the milkman’s bell, the crow’s thump) and rich imagery to turn everyday life into something lyrical. In this sense Dreamland is eclectic: one moment readers are in wild tantric ecstasy, the next they are in a scholarly’s dusty study. Yet Bagchi threads both with a common undercurrent – in Banku’s case, an almost mystical reverence for the act of writing. We even get a touch of meta-fantasy: Banku half-expects his detective character (born of his mind) to appear in the room beside him. In Banku’s quiet yearning, Bagchi shows how stories can indeed blur the boundary between reality and imagination.

The Dream and the Dystopia

The third part of the collection plunges into speculative futures – near enough to feel real, but strange enough to feel dreamlike. In “Traumland: The Genome of Power,” we meet Elena, a high-ranking official in a dystopian Federation (think not-too-distant tomorrow). Here Bagchi channels a political thriller: a populace is controlled by mind-and-body editing (genes overwritten with docile traits), and Elena is on the brink of a covert revolution. Yet even this technocratic plot is steeped in the book’s recurrent tropes of memory and illusion. One climactic scene has Elena sitting before a holographic mirror of herself – one “current” self hardened by power, the other her vulnerable pre-edit self. The conversation that ensues is portentous and philosophical: the two Elenas debate whether “power protects you from memory” or whether “doubt was the key”. In other words, Bagchi literalizes the idea that our self can fragment.

Soon after, the narrative reaches a truly uncanny moment: an unknown voice declares “Replication complete. Initiating seed fork.” Almost at once, every genetically edited mind in the country pauses. Bagchi handles this with a novelist’s flair for the surreal. We do not necessarily need to understand every technological term; the writing frames it more like a mythic turning point. Indeed, immediately following this, one character reflects that “The loop wasn’t a prison. It was a birthing chamber”. These lines (untethered from their full context of a coup d’état) speak to the book’s larger currents: reality can loop back on itself, creating new life. In some ways this story is the most conventionally “science-fiction” in the collection – it involves genome editing, CRISPR tattoos, and secret hacker cells – but Bagchi never forgets to probe the human dimension. The elders who have had their personalities overwritten begin to “drift,” memories and lost desires bubbling up in the street. Some “screamed,” some laughed – a vividly unsettling hint of collective awakening.

Even more futuristically, the final segment “Generative Rebuild” takes us deeper into quantum and cyber realms. Here the protagonist is Lodin, an enigmatic scientist who has (presumably) achieved some form of immortality. Bagchi’s language in this section is richly technical yet poetic. Scientists Marcus and Sarah are astounded by vectors and tensors that form a “living, evolving phenomenon” – the very fabric of consciousness made visible. One character marvels, “The tensor fields… are defining relationships across super-dimensional spaces. These aren’t random connections; they’re structured”. The imagery here is almost mystical: the scientists watch computer harmonics that “resonat[e] with echoes of human consciousness.” Lodin’s work is described as weaving “fragments of consciousness into a higher-dimensional tapestry”. Throughout, Bagchi is not shy about laying on the metaphors: we read of a “cosmic loom” and “super-dimensional strings.” Yet these details never feel gratuitous; instead, they reinforce that even quantum mechanics can be poetic when handled with care. The prose continues to feel like high-minded dream-fantasy: at one point Marcus and Sarah realize that Lodin’s mind no longer needs a body, because he has mastered “a realm of infinite possibilities” beyond time and space.

Crucially, Bagchi still humanizes the scenario. There is trepidation and wonder on the faces of Sarah and Marcus as reality shifts. The narrative acknowledges how terrifying it is to watch Lodin “reshaping the probabilistic fabric of reality”. When Sarah finally sums it up – “He’s not just trying to exist… he’s trying to control existence” – the line reads as both a thriller’s reveal and a philosophical insight. It ties back to the Tantra idea: is the self content with the cage of normalcy, or does it reach beyond it? Even without overt magic, the science-fiction pieces feel dreamlike in their ambition: to rewrite not just the self, but the rules of reality.

Illumination and Coherence

Taken together, the stories of Dreamland may seem disparate – and in a way, they are wildly different. But as a critic might note, Bagchi provides threads that help them cohere. Chief among these is the recurring theme of illusion versus truth. Whether it’s a tantric dancer teaching a mourner that māyā is lesson, or a cloned politician discovering an echo of her original self, each tale asks what is real in a world full of veils. The title Dreamland itself suggests that life might be more dream than waking fact; indeed, characters often undergo transformations that blur boundaries of life, death, memory and identity.

Stylistically, Bagchi’s range is as broad as his subjects. He shifts seamlessly from rhapsodic, almost biblical narration (the chants and rituals are presented with reverence) to crisp, even clinical exposition (the science lab scenes, with their technical jargon). In a single collection one finds ornate descriptions of a goddess’s body and, in the next chapter, a detailed explanation of quantum erasure protocols. Such juxtapositions are adventurous, and remarkably Bagchi pulls them off without feeling disjointed. The editorial comments, footnotes and ritual verses interspersed in the fantasy sections – and even an appendix quoting Ramakrishna that emphasizes “No path has a monopoly on truth” – give the whole volume an almost meta-fictional flair. It is as if Bagchi wants to remind us that all these diverse threads are meaningful: from Kali worship to CRISPR, they are paths to grapple with the divine and the self.

Emotionally, the collection hits both head and heart. Readers come for the spectacle – and Bagchi delivers in spades – but they stay for the humanity. He loves his characters, no matter how minor: the lonely archivist, the guilt-ridden hero, the idealistic Chancellor, the obsessed scientist. Even in the midst of tongue-twisting quantum theory, a sentence like “He rose naked… no longer a son, no longer a mourner” (describing one tantric hero’s rebirth) carries a quiet dignity. Moments of tenderness sneak in: an aging man clutching a blank page, a woman whispering a mantra to herself in solitude. This undercurrent of warmth prevents the book from ever feeling like sterile philosophy.

Finally, one must admire the ambition of Bagchi’s vision. He has set himself a huge task – to blend Eastern mysticism, Western science and formal literary flair in one volume – and he largely succeeds. The narrative may sometimes demand the reader’s trust (the harder science bits can verge on the abstruse), but there is a creative integrity at work. A major newspaper review might note that Bagchi seems genuinely fascinated by his material, and that fascination is infectious. Indeed, he wears his erudition lightly. A casual reader intrigued by mystery, metaphysics or mind-bending sci-fi can dip into this book in any order and find themselves captured.

In sum, Dreamland is a dense, multifaceted anthology – at turns strange, vivid and even comforting. It is proof that genre boundaries are permeable: a computer can hum cosmic hymns, and a tantric rite can sparkle with narrative suspense. While Bagchi’s prose occasionally strains under its own complexity, the overall effect is a tapestry both rich and readable. We close the book with the feeling that, like his characters, we too have glimpsed something profound: perhaps that consciousness and story are just two sides of the same dream. As one of his characters might say, “Each thought is a fragment, each life a verse” – and Dreamland is a book full of such verses beckoning us to listen.

Invitation to Readers: Shamit Bagchi’s Dreamland will appeal to the curious and contemplative alike. Whether you savor the exotic colors of myth, or the intellectual pulse of hard SF, here is work that rewards close reading. Bagchi’s narratives do not hold our hand, but they do light our path through the darkness. Approach Dreamland with an open mind, and you may find yourself forever changed by its visions of illusion and awakening.

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