Dreams, Sweet Dreams!

There were great men and women in the annals of world history, who had great dreams for the world and for their nation; some of the speeches of great men reiterating their dreams have become models of public speech. But unfortunately not all can dream the kind of dream they should dream; there are limitations all around them; their blissful dreams are rudely cut short by hardcore reality, which drags them to confront the misery, despair and hardship they had been trying hard to forget. But that is just one kind of dream that we often hear about, the dreams which shape and mould human beings, and civilizations. For now however I would turn my attention to commonplace dreams.

Is there anyone who does not get dreams while sleeping? All of us, big or small, men or women, Hindu or Muslim, all of us dream, and most often we have no control over what we dream. In other words, we cannot pre-plan and program our minds in such a way that we should get only one kind of dreams. Luckily human beings have not managed to enter into that part of the brain, which controls every one of our dreams. Thank God for them, we are able to get a glimpse of our unconscious and subconscious mind, and are awestruck at the way our dreams project our personality traits, our orientations and our choices. Ultimately our dreams are truly our true selves.

Psychoanalysts and psychiatrists depend a lot on dreams to get to know the mind of their clients; though we cannot swear by analysis of our dreams and their implications in our daily living, one thing is for sure, they have certain layers of our personality which is not known to anyone, living or dead. Sigmund Freud and his disciple Carl Jung had tried to understand dreams, and Freud’s interpretation of dreams is still considered a masterpiece. But what happens when we get up early in the morning with our minds not able to remember the dreams we had lived so vividly a few hours ago? Some say that often there would be a particular pattern in our dreams, which may offer significant clue to our personality.

When a person enters into the alpha stage of sleep, what we may call the deep sleep, then the body, mind and spirit are in unison, and that is the moment when many of the deep-seated traits and elements of our being surface from our un/sub conscious. When we move from that deep sleep to shallow sleep, the dreams part, and we may sometimes have only traces or tailpieces of those dreams. For one thing, we cannot force ourselves to remember and recollect the dreams we had in the morning, and there is no mechanism to cultivate our minds to recapture our dreams. Maybe in the future, scientists will be able to do that, but for now, we have no way of finding it.

Recently one of our senior fathers had narrated some of the most beautiful dreams he had, while undergoing treatment for typhoid; when I asked him if he had dreams, he told me that he did not dream, but re-lived those glorious moments of the past. There was a sweet glow around him, as he began to narrate them (several times) to me. I am trying to recapture one or two of my past events, which can become the tonic for my soul, so that when I am down and unable to cope with reality around me, I can look up to them and draw consolation and solace. I know some of the seemingly insignificant events of my life, but were shaping moments, will one day pop up during sleep and carve a niche in my self, to show light to my path!