Dreams

Dreams to dream.

     All that can be witnessed, seen, observed in wakefulness is phenomena.

     All that which can be seen in a dream is hallucination, reverie, aspiration or trance.

What do these dreams try to tell us?  Are they related to real life or are they just illusions created by a restless mind?

Many of us wonder hopelessly, trying to decipher our dreams.  

     Dreams reflect the mysteries or dark sides of life. The modern dream analysis is producing amazing psychic insights. A treatment called ‘Dream therapy’ is emerging as a very effective tool for a person’s emotional wellbeing. Dreams help emotional healing and also in answering your most difficult queries that may be creating strange situations in life. The dream therapy bonds the inner thoughts with the exterior physical world. According to psychoanalytical theory, when you go to sleep, tell yourself that you would like to seek a solution to your problem. And slowly, the answer unfolds before you in your dream. It helps to identify ourselves and reach our goals.

     Dreams are fantasies unexplored. Daydreaming is generally considered to be a foolish thing when it remains just as a thought. But it can be true when works over it by trying to understand it and follow it with determination. Just building castles in the air and doing nothing about it makes the daydreams and object of mockery for the people. When the same thoughts are put to deeds, the person’s efforts are reckoned and acknowledged.

     Dreams are our guides that draw us out of any difficult situation, when the mind is perplexed and unable to take decisions. When you wake up with a certain jolt try immediately to remember what was it that you saw in the dream. It might be a dream that was trying to make you aware of some forthcoming problem. Dreams alert the mind, forewarns it to be active and accept whatever is to be faced in the future.

     Nightmares on the contrary dishearten a person. One may just sit up in bed, horrified, drenched in perspiration and in a state of complete shock. It might be some bad thought that may have occupied the mind, and that may have taken the shape of a bed dream. When these negative thoughts or acts remain to the self and are not disclosed they cause emotional disturbance, fear, tension, worry, anger and hatred, anything that could not be released from the mind and left undeterred.

These nightmares may be harmless and should not be taken seriously. Instead a healthy and peaceful lifestyle should be adopted to keep the mind and thoughts happy and positive. Because goals without action are dreams and actions without goals are nightmares.

     It is a world of great beauty and great cruelty, where the lines between reality and dreams are hopelessly blurred. But when these dreams are brought to reality they make life prosperous. It can be possible only through a determined and composed mind.  As truly said by Henry Davis Thoreau, “Dreams are the touchstones of our character.”

In a biography of former President of India, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, ‘Dreams to Reality’, Srinivas Laxman writes how Kalam as a young boy wished to fly in the air like the beautiful birds. This passion for flying aroused by beautiful birds, years later inspired Dr. Kalam to design India’s first rocket. At the time when Kalam was growing up, no one had even dreamt of such a happening. It was his dream that was put to reality with his hard work, determination and humility that gave India the rocket scientist. Had it not been for his dream to fly like those beauties in the air, India’s ‘Missile Man’ as the media addresses him would not be amongst us. He was also nicknamed Mr. Nuke and the ‘father of the Nuclear Bomb’, after his success in nuclear tests.

As a saying goes, ‘Dream, dream, dream,

                               Dream transforms into thoughts,

                               Thoughts result into action.’ 

     Today psychologists are applying modern technology to probe the content of dreams. Through the computers content analysis is conducted which interprets the colours in the dream. Red colour means action, excitement and desire. Blue equals calmness, tranquility and harmony. While black connotes fear, anxiety and intimidations. 

     According to some celebrities, the successes in fulfilling their dreams have various perspectives. As Madhu Menon, a software engineer turned chief restaurateur, Shiok, Bangalore says, “The most important question to ask yourself is, ‘Do I see myself doing this for the next 20 years?’  If the answer is an unhesitant ‘yes’, then dare to dream the dream. The ways and means will follow……….”

As Deepa Mehta, a film maker puts it, “We all have to find the strength within us. When unsuccessful, we must try to rebuild our dreams to complete them,”

Since time immemorial people have tried to follow their dreams using wise or unwise means, because human nature is such that it cannot survive without hope. And dreams build hope to achieve something in life, to make life more meaningful and full of substance. The difference lies only in the interpretation of the dream to fulfill it.

A thought by William Law explains it very well,

“A Life devoted to the interests and enjoyments of their world, spent and wasted in the slavery of earthly desires, maybe truly called dream, as having all the shortness, vanity and delusion of a dream, only with this great difference, lost but fiction and fancies, but when the dream of life is ended only by death all that eternity is lost, for which we were brought into being.”