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Vashi2Panvel.com: Navi Mumbai: November 22: In the tranquillity of the night, when silence reigns all over the darkness, they coyly tiptoe into your mind. Tenuous, flittering forms, seek you out from the deepest voids of your soul and open for you a panorama of visions— ridiculous, petrifying, extraordinary—and sometimes hauntingly beautiful. You wake up with a start, groping in the dark, for a mystery that enveloped you just a second ago, but now seems an eternity away.

What else but a dream could bind infinity into a boundary? Something as unreal as a dream, is as real as an experience, yet as far from reality as it can get. Dreams are visual poetry. All you've got to do is learn the language to understand its metaphors.

Our dreams combine verbal, visual and emotional stimuli into a sometimes broken, absurd but often amusing story line. We can sometimes even solve problems in our sleep. Or can we? Many experts disagree on exactly what the purpose of our dreams might be. Are they strictly random brain impulses, or are our brains actually working through issues from our daily life while we sleep -- as a sort of coping mechanism? Should we even bother to interpret our dreams? Many say yes, that we have a great deal to learn from our dreams.

“Everybody dreams, each night as we sleep our subconscious processes all the thoughts and images within our minds - and it is this processing which causes dreams to occur. Dreams have been said to be the road to the unconscious - and through them we can grow to learn more about ourselves, our emotions and the way we work,” says Chandrahas Tenneti, counsellor and psychotherapist.

In fact, to a large extent, dreams try and convey the thoughts in your subconscious mind to your real self, by playing it out through symbols in dreams. As the pioneer dream analyst Sigmund Freud said, “Interpretation of dreams is the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious.”

Have you ever talked to a friend about a dream you've had, only to find out that he or she has had the same one? Scientists and doctors have listened to thousands of people describe their dreams, and have come up with lists of what they call "universal dreams," or dreams containing stories or images that are common to many people. Some universal dreams include, chase or attack- a criminal, monster or hungry animal is chasing you; losing something- you drop or misplace a valuable or important object and can't get it back; finding something- you find something unexpected, like a room in your house you never knew was there before; celebrities -- you meet someone famous; failing- you can't remember any answers to an important test, or you suddenly can't play your instrument during a big recital; flying- you soar happily through the clouds looking down on the world; falling- you fall off a cliff or into a huge hole; naked- you show up at school or in another public place without clothes; lost- you're somewhere you've never been before and can't find your way back home; late- you miss the bus or the school bell or you're late to some other important event; stuck- you're in danger, but you can't move your legs to run, or you can't find the voice to yell.

So why do so many people have dreams that contain these basic ideas or themes? If you look at the list, you might notice that these aren't things that happen everyday, but they aren't too way-out either. In fact, these dreams are based around desires, fears, or anxieties that almost all people share. Nobody wants to fail, or be embarrassed, or get lost, or lose something important. If we're stressed out about things like this, they might pop up in our dreams, even if the details are different from what we've been thinking about while awake. Every person in the world is unique, but we share a lot of the same fears and fantasies. Because our minds think about these things a lot, they tend to pop up in our dreams.

While analysing a dream, the most important thing to keep in mind is that your dreams reflect your own underlying thoughts and feelings, and that the people, actions, settings and emotions in your dreams are personal to you. Emphasizes Dr Francis A Menezes, a dream analyst, “Some dream experts theorize that there are typical or classic dreams and dream elements that persist across different persons, cultures, and times. Usually, however, the same image or symbol will have different meanings for different people. For example, a lion in a dream can mean one thing to a zoo keeper and something quite different to a child who has just heard a story about a wicked lion. Therefore, books which give a specific meaning for a specific dream image or symbol (or "dream dictionaries") are useless.”

Nevertheless, as far as emotions go, the most common emotion manifested in a dream is fear. Clinical psychologist, Dr Sanjeev Kale says, “The one emotion we all don’t like to feel is fear. The one way for it to release is in the form of dreams which often take the form of nightmares. This could be killing, falling from a height, being chased by a monster or drowning.” The reason, says Dr Menezes, for not being able to interpret the same dream for different persons in one way, is because, each person lives under different circumstances, is brought up in a different way and has different value systems and beliefs.

Dreams can sometimes help us out in ways that we don't realize, but those who have realized it have benefited. One of the biggest occurrences of creative dreaming that we can relate to is a dream of Lewis Carroll's. The complete story of Alice in Wonderland came to Carroll in a dream he had.
Think about this… We need not spend our waking lives trying to think of a blockbuster idea for a movie or story. All we have to do is remember what we have dreamt and perhaps it will just be crazy enough to become a legendary story! The thing is that our dreams are usually closer to representing real life than we could imagine ourselves, since our subconscious mind tends to pick up a few of the little details our conscious mind leaves out.


Lakshmi Subramanian