I have dreams both beautiful and bizarre

“Dreams are not those which come while we are sleeping, but dreams are those when you don’t sleep before fulfilling them” – Abdul Kalam

I always love to flirt with dreams. And I don’t grade them big or small. My thoughts and perceptions about them go well with dictionaries that say ‘dreams are the manifestations of one’s pent up feelings, desires, images and sensations, occurring during sleep’. Hence, a dream is a thing relating to human mind and not body.’ A matter of mind’, I would say. Though a dream is a matter or vision you experience in an unconscious state of mind, it still piggybacks you the rest of your life, make you reshape it in such a fashion to get what you aspire for.

“I saw my mom in my dream the night before,” said my friend, one evening, when we were in a restaurant sipping degree coffee. ‘She didn’t seem to age. She was like the same when I last saw her in my teens”, added my friend, his eyes moved to tears. Not a worldly person, my friend was always impassive and flat – a big stone sans emotions. But, now his dream made him euphoric as the old sweet memories of his mom seemed overtake him. ‘That’s another dimension of dreams; they paint human lives with tasteful colors,’ I told my friend who nodded his head in the affirmative. A dream has the power of adding luster to a man’s life, if he is emotional or stoic, give him wings and make him fly to the land of his fantasies.

There are still persons who say, with pride, that they don’t get dreams. They even compliment them for not living in a make believe world. I only pity those rough-hewn, passionless minds. I would call them uncharged gizmos no matter how elegantly they look and work smartly. That the odds men face in lives give them only those skills necessary for living and shut all his dreams and fantasies cannot be accepted. For, dreams represent what people see, hear, experience and wish. No man can latch his mind to avoid getting dreams. We’d better remember that dreams aren’t our errand boys but masters.

Though, to a section of humanity, dreams are superficial things – a bundle of mysteries – they still become integral part of one’s life. They are significant as they aren’t biased. Both the rich and the poor, the king and the slave can catch up with their dreams and stretch them the way they like. A dream is like a movie where you, a decrepit citizen, watch yourself swapping position with a monarch. The only tool a dream needs is a mind: a mind capable of dreaming, a mind capable of sustaining a swirl of fantasies.

 So many are the hurdles of life that it always become impossible for you to get what you desire. You often begin to hunt an elephant, but end up trapping only a mouse. The wounds your psyche thus receive from life gets healed by dreams. They, for example, make a physical wreck become a world champion in a hurdle race; a decrepit writer, thus find himself getting a Noble Prize for his writings – though they’re pedestrian; and an adolescent boy, to his excitement, sees himself flirting with a dream girl of his choice. That’s the effects of the dreams, they metamorphose men and women what they aren’t in true life.

There were times man could not deduce reasons why he had dreams.  Long research, after much sweat, found REM [rapid eye moment] stage of sleep to be the cause of dreams. That’s right. But even assuming that you get your dreams during your REM, some dreams never allow you to sleep before you fulfill them. It happened to Napoleon and Gandhi. Moved by their dreams, both, one a warrior and the other a Karma Yogi, went sleepless until they made their visions come true. But, wait. If you want to have the hang of a dream, it needs to be a quality one -- worthy of pursuing.

People all over the world invest their best mettle and achieve something remarkable in many fields, but attribute the reasons for their feats to dreams. Pitifully, we still have persons in our midst who evince interest only in getting their dreams interpreted than working to make their visions come true. This happens because we lack courage; don’t have the fire to follow our dreams. People, with indomitable courage and grit, don’t let their dreams go past them or let anyone stop them from having them as goals. To them, dreams are treasure troves, and, to follow them and fulfill them, they would forgo food, sleep and all the comforts of life. Like the sun rotating with the earth, they rotate with their visions.

Since ‘dream is a wish your heart make’, believe it, work for it and make it come true. To honor your dreams that show you a rosy way, you could make them a ladder, climb it and reach out to the higher rungs of life.