“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.
