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!

Caring for the Treasure House

We often realize the worth of things and persons only in their absence. A father may be the worst kind of person and notorious drunkard, and the mother may curse him each day, why God is not calling him; but look at the same mother after the untimely death of the father. She would not be happy to have lost her husband; she would feel the pinch only when he is no more there. Probably all these years, she was able to look only at his drunkenness, and not any thing else. But after his death, she realizes that he was much more than a mere drunkard; at least sometimes, when he was sober, he used to be affectionate and loving towards her.

The same is also true of our human body; we do not realize what a treasure house we possess in our bodies; maybe a whole life will not be sufficient to understand the minute intricate mechanism which is operative in our bodies; the crisscrossing of veins, bones, flesh, and all of them perfectly linked to the mind, the central processing unit. When one of the body parts is dysfunctional, it affects the entire body, and that is what is so very obvious, when we look at one of our senior friends, who has spoiled both his kidneys, and is frantically on the look out for a donor, and a nursing home which will conduct the transplant.

Life is not the same when these kidneys have refused to filter the waste; he has to go for four agonising hours of dialysis, twice a week. When he returns after the dialysis, he is half dead; he has not much energy, and each day, as his body weight increases due to the accumulation of urine, he feels uncomfortable, and so cannot engage in any serious work. Life has come to a standstill for him, and therefore whenever there is a ray of hope for transplant, he gets excited, and sincerely hopes that something good will come out of this desire. When he neglected the care of his body for several years, he did not realize what could happen to him one day, and today he regrets for neglecting the care of his health.

It is illegal to even indirectly convince a person to donate one of his/her kidneys so that this friend of ours may live a fairly healthy life, for atleast another ten or fifteen years. It is also unethical, to imply that our friend's life is more worthwhile than the donor, even if it is a friend who has come forward to do this great favor. The moral and ethical questions are not easy to resolve, though it is easy to cut short the arguments on the ground that all lives are equal, and if one has destroyed one's kidneys due to neglect, it is for the one to reap the fruits of what he had done, but humanly speaking we cannot stop at that.

Most of us falter in life, not out of willful, deliberate action, but out of ignorance and carelessness. If only our friend had known for sure that if he did not care for his health, and take necessary precaution, he may lose his kidneys, probably he might not have landed at this stage. But could he be given yet another chance to taste and see what life has to offer to him? It is a big lesson for us, to realize the worth of each of the body parts, big or small, all of them have a specific role and function. Yesterday I saw a middleaged man, whose both feet have been amputated. Yet he looked quite happy, walking on his knees. He may feel envious of us, but do we sufficiently care for our feet?