In common parlance (= ordinary talks) dreams are slightingly referred to as an idle thing. People say, don’t dream, be practical. But dreams have proved to be a great thing in human life. It has, however, many layers of significance.
A new born baby is often seen to smile in its slumber. Mothers fondly hold that it holds converse with its Maker in dreams. It may be a fiction, a figment of the mother’s imagination. But the science of psychology has enlarged upon the great values of dreams. Siegmund Freud, a pioneer psychologist, interprets dreams as compensation for a man’s unfulfilled desires. He terms it as wish- fulfillment. His able successor Carl Jung has cured many mental patients by recording their dreams. From the study of these he has often arrived at the central focus of the patient’s desire-complex.
Our day-to-day life has two levels of existence. One when we are awake and the other when we are asleep. Dreams affect our second mode of existence and have thousand and one varieties. Majority of these are a recurrence or repetitions in a jumbled (= oddly mingled) form of fragments of our daily life. They are good, bad or indifferent. But it often happens that one or two types of our behaviours visit us in our dreams. Sometimes we behave so oddly in dreams that it makes us laugh as we wake up.
Our mind is, perhaps, more vast than ocean and even more restless and unsteady than the ocean waters. When we are awake our conscious self takes control of our actions. But when we are asleep our unconscious deep takes control of our mind. Our motor (= motion-begetting) functions remain inactive as we sleep. We move, run or jump in dreams but not in reality. Sometimes we are to the brink of sure ruin, like falling from a multistoried building, lying in the same room with a dead person. Our nerves become tense and overdrawn. We wake up heavily sweating.
Psychologists hold that there is an immediate and superficial level of unconsciousness into which we sink in sleep. This is the subconscious. There are numerous layers below it which are of great help in judging a man’s personality.
But beside these clinical or semi-clinical functions, dreams have a nobler function too. Poets and philosophers are often called dreamers. Their dreams are kinds of visions. These are conscious and meaningful constructs (= ideal pictures of life) that present to us new interpretations of our life in future. Thus the poets and philosophers are likened to sages or seers.
Dreams have contributed to and enriched literature, Coleridge composed his poems on his dreams and life and moral purport (= purposeful meaning). gave them new
It is a truth that our day-to-day real life becomes only a child’s play if it is left only at that. We do not live to eat, we eat to live. And to live implies to live meaningfully, not merely for the sake of living. Dreams transfer us into that realm where alone we can find our life’s real essence and significance. We ought not to chuck (=reject) it as odd and useless. On the contrary we ought to regard it with respect and consideration. Remember these two lines of the great bard (= poet), Shakespeare:
“We are such stuff as dreams are made of
And our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
