oh dreams.. you are fascinating!!

It was an afternoon, a couple of weeks before I guess. After taking lunch, I was sitting on the cot. My laptop was placed on the cot with a song playing in windows media player. I could not recognize the song as I was hearing it for the first time. It started with a mild prelude, sort of a song in a melancholic situation. Suddenly there was a sound in between. What is that…? It’s like the sound of a vehicle horn and what’s the need for that in this song. I wondered. In another few seconds, I heard something falling down on the floor. I woke up suddenly and realized that I was in dream. The song I listened to and the horn sound I heard were in fact in the dream which I had a few minutes before during the nap. I saw my laptop screen and it was not even turned on at that time. 

Later after a few days, I heard the same song again while I was travelling in a town bus. It was from the tamil film ‘Paradesi’. Oh.. wait.. where is the horn sound? It was missing now. I wondered how. I mean, how the horn sound came into the dream. I still have no clue about how that sound came into my dream.

Yesterday afternoon, I had this dream that a granny was taking food in my house. I saw her eating fish curry with brinjal. She is a relative to my family, of the same age as my grandmother and used to visit my house often. I saw also in the dream the same day where a man of late 30s, may be diplomat, was walking in the corridor to meet his superior officer. He had a file in his hand and while walking, he drops a book by mistake. A young man takes it and opens it. In the first page there was written something and the handwriting was quite familiar to me. And that’s the end of the dream. I couldn’t remember whether these two incidents occurred in the same dream or in different but both happened while I was sleeping yesterday noon.

Not only these two incidents, there are quite a number of dreams which threw me a lot of questions. The basic questions are ‘how’ and ‘why’. In fact dream is one thing that fascinates me like anything. I am now obsessed with them for a few months to an extent that I started making a log of my own dreams in a separate notebook.

What is a dream?

 

Ok. What is a dream, by the way? One greatest advantage of internet is that it serves as a source of information for almost anything and everything. My obsession and curiosity made me spent considerable amount of time in searching over the internet for stuffs related to dreams. The more I read, the more I am interested in dreams.

Researchers define dream as a picture in your head that appears while sleeping, which may or may not be related to the events of our life. It can include anything ranging from images, thoughts, emotions, etc. It may be very very vague, or extraordinarily vivid, or scary enough to take away the rest of your sleep, or pleasant enough to make you smile for next couple of days. More importantly it may or may not be meaningful. This is the most interesting aspect and beauty of dreams. 

Dream researchers claim that sometimes our dreams have our own life incidents, like a replay, with certain unfamiliar events mixed up. Our dreams are a result of our actions and thoughts throughout the day which we incorporate them. Why we see them in our dreams is still a mystery to the researchers. Some say that they really do have a purpose while some others say that they don’t have sense at all. That’s the beauty of dreams. 

Why did I dream of the granny?

As told already that dreams are a reflection of our actions, I could relate some of my dreams (which I remember) very well with the events associated with my life. I deduced to some extent the reasons for the occurrences narrated above. When I slept yesterday, I was reading a novel. It is a memoir of an intelligence officer. I have started reading it only a few days before. It was so much interesting and impressive the way the author described his office, the corridors, and all. The corridor I saw in my dream was more or less same as how I imagined the office when reading the memoir. That could be the reason why I saw a man walking with a file in his hands. The booked he dropped resembled another book I had taken from district library a few weeks before.

The granny visited my house my a few days before. On that day my mother prepared fish and brinjal for lunch. She took lunch in our house and appreciated my mother for its deliciousness! That may have a reason how she jumped into my dream. A coincidence was that, my mother again made fish on the day I had this dream. 

That makes perfect sense. At the same time, they sometimes do not have any meaning at all, like the song and horn sound. In the above narrated incidents, the actions took place in my dream are those happened earlier in my life. There are also occurrences of dreams where the actions haven’t happened really but you may either want it or don’t want to happen in your life.

I used to go to an ice cream parlor with two of my best buddies while I was doing my post graduation. Once while chitchatting in the parlor, my friend told that what I will do if my project guide visits the shop now. Actually I was eluding from my professor at that time due to delay in the task I needed to accomplish. So she made such a statement just funnily. And that night I had the dream of sitting in the same ice cream shop with the same friends and suddenly there is a voice “Ashik... What a surprise!” A very friendly and familiar voice and Yes it’s my project guide. I was shocked. And that’s the end of the dream.

Simply saying, dream is all about our day to day actions and thoughts. The question of how a particular event is reflected in our dream is answered. The ‘why’ is still unanswered and the purpose still remains a mystery.