DREAMS – DO THEY MEAN ANYTHING?

  

DREAMS – DO THEY MEAN ANYTHING?

  

Sleep and dreams are inseparable and always go together, day or night. Every time you sleep, there are bound to be dreams, tangible or intangible. While few dreams are well remembered, most of them are not. Dreams may be all about inner thoughts and suppressed feelings. I believe our brain being a natural memory board cluttered as it were with myriad thoughts and events - positive or negative - substantive, obscure or insignificant - dormant or otherwise – some of which at times erupt in dreams. While pleasant dreams are like good movies, the frightening ones are horror films, I suppose. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that dreams were akin to prediction of future events and visitations by the dead. But there are hardly any takers for this theory since it doesn’t or can’t pass scientific scrutiny being mindboggling and logic-defying. I think dream is a fragile and nebulous construction connecting our experiences and expectations, something to do with or without our suppressed emotions, longing and craving in a tenuous and amorphous web-net of ponderables and imponderables.

 

The scientific study of dreams is called ‘Oneirology’. For centuries people have been mulling over the meaning of dreams with no crystal-clear results or conclusions.

 

My good dreams included, inter alia, meeting different persons and engaging in interesting conversations and arguments with them and good things happening around. While I could recall some, certain others are too hazy to remember. The bad ones (nightmares) included missing the trains/buses by a whisker, writing an examination where I reel under pressure in race with time with many questions still to be answered with a just few minutes to go before end of the time, still searching for a house for rent though I do own a flat now, getting stuck up on the top of a wall or tree branch from where I am unable to jump down or come out, sudden change of topography of even some known areas, falling of one or more of my teeth etc. not to speak of scary incidents. Human evolution theories suggest that man evolved from monkey/chimpanzee species. Probably that link is manifest in such dreams. People alive dying and the dead coming alive would send me into a tizzy at times.

 

Appearance of a snake in a dream, some say, represents one’s underlying yet known, unknown and/or non-specific fears or apprehensions.

 

There are certain taboos too. Positive dreams are believed to be bad omen and negative ones a good harbinger. Some say ‘wedding’ and ‘currency notes’ are not that auspicious to appear in dreams. Interestingly and intriguingly, some other negative dreams are believed to augur well, (logic, excuse me)!

 

One is really not able to untie the tricky knots and solve the riddles and puzzles that our dreams are fraught with. There are many tangled knots that have to be loosened.

 

Though I have already retired, at times I do get dreams, of course rarely, as if I am still in service with some months or days remaining to retire that would baffle and flummox me.

 

Some say day-dreams never come true. That is why they say, “Don’t daydream”. Again, there is a belief that early morning dreams turn a reality. However, both defy sense or logic. With all said and done, we come back to ‘square one’ only despite our long search for the truth regarding dreams.

 

The search or research is like one in the wild trying to find a missing needle there, or perhaps like a wild goose hunt. The journey into the unknown continues in an endless spiral with no avail with enigma and mystery continuing to be clueless.

 

A neurobiological theory of dreaming is ‘activation-synthesis hypothesis’ which means that dreams don’t actually mean anything; they are merely electrical brain impulses that pull random thoughts and imagery from our memories. Despite some new theories attempting to throw light on the inscrutability behind human dreams, nothing conclusive or concrete has emerged as yet.

 

About optimistic dreams, there is a saying, "When we wake up in the morning, we have two choices. Go back to sleep and continue dreaming, or wake up and chase those dreams to turn them into reality with positive results."

 

On a lighter vein, once the heads of Governments of the U.S., U.K., Russia and India met. The U.S. President said that God appeared and greeted him in his dream the previous night. The U.K. Prime Minister bragged that God appearing in his dream appreciated all his achievements. The Russian President was thanked by God in his dream for building many places of worship. The shrewd Indian quipped quietly and stumped the rest thus, “I don’t remember to have appeared in anyone’s dream yesternight”. How’s that?

 

 

R.SAMPATH

23/4/2020