Anar dreams
It’s very possible that I have held the biggest pomegranate arils known to man in the palm of my right hand, in my head

December 11, 2006
iranian.com

Did you ever have a powerfully real dream that was a 50/50 combination of the fantastic and the mundane?  The following dream actually did happen, although I added a sentence at the end to tie it all together.

I was sleeping around three or four in the afternoon today, and in my head, I went to the refrigerator to get something to eat.  I had just opened the fridge door when, to my surprise, something in a plastic bag fell from a shelf to the floor with a heavy thud.  I picked it up and saw the Wholesome Choice logo on the bag, recognizing it as the one pomegranate left from my last minute food pickup in Irvine, California, some two weeks ago. 

To my dismay, upon removing the pomegranate from the bag, I saw that it had flattened on one spot, I’m guessing from the fall.  What's more, its skin was white or pink in many areas, and had large folds running obliquely around it, like the torso of an obese person... how strange. 

That's when I noticed that the pomegranate was huge -- at least the size of a 20 inch non-flatscreen TV, though considerably lighter.  This was extremely exciting; I carefully placed it on the kitchen table, then called over my brother to take a look at this freak of nature, which had to contain either the largest anar seeds on Earth, or the most numerous, or maybe even both.  My brother approached the pomegranate and was similarly enthralled by its magnificent size and bizarre skin.  I told him that this pomegranate was ready to open, that it would not even take a knife but could be pulled apart by hand.

Bracing the crook of my elbow around the calyx, I grabbed a fold on one side of the anar with my free hand and gave it a mighty pull, tearing away a great deal of skin and pith, the latter resembling Styrofoam in its density and texture.  There were no fruits in the fold of skin I had torn off, but in the pomegranate itself, underneath a thin white layer, lay arils that literally glowed, giving off a reddish light.  My brother and I pulled away the remaining membrane. 

Sure enough, the fruits were the largest that I had ever seen in my life; I gingerly placed my right hand around two danehs and worked them back and forth until they came off.  I do not exaggerate when I say that these two arils entirely filled the palm of my hand, and that they shimmered like rubies.  Wanting to record this moment in history, I told my brother that I was going to go get the camera, and ran upstairs to find it.

By the time that I had returned, my brother had managed to find cerulean-colored fruits from the interior of the pomegranate, the likes of which I had never seen before.  These seeds were much smaller, but gleamed with a frigid intensity equal and opposite to that of the red gems that I still clutched in my palm. 

I took a picture of my brother holding a dozen bluish arils vertically stacked between his two index fingers.  I don’t remember us eating any of the fruits, and I didn’t even get to pop one of them, which I am sure would’ve painted anything within a ten foot radius with its purple juice.  But it’s very possible that I have held the biggest pomegranate arils known to man in the palm of my right hand, in my head. 

Afterwards, at around 4:45, I actually did wake up and made myself a breakfast of mashadi bread, Serrano peppers, Bulgarian feta, bacon, and scrambled eggs.  Then I found twenty dollars. Comment

Maziar Shirazi is a graduate from Rutgers University and holds a B.A. in Spanish. He is currently a medical student at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, New Jersey. Features in iranian.com