Dream

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

                                                    We are of such stuff

                                                    as dreams are made on...

What is the dream stuff that man is made on? Shakespeare knew better. Did he mean the unreality, the maya which wields its magic to enthral us? Perhaps the very reality of life is unreal, evanescent like the pearl illusion of morning dew on faded lily petals at day break, but when you wade through the mud to collect the pearls only your fingers get wet, the sheen is gone. It’s like love: you worship your Princess, call her your soul force, spend a life time loving her but the gates of her palace never open, your songs return rhythmless, the tune is torn apart by the hissing wind. Or is it like climbing a slippery mountain, you strive, strain and go tantalizingly forward braving wind and rain but you never plant your flag at the top. Whatever it is , it is so passionately absorbing , goading you to move ahead forgetting the blood letting thorns, the failure writ large all around notwithstanding, you succeed in traversing  the road to nothing. You wipe the sweat from your forehead, gloat over the glories which none notice but you go on till it lasts- the journey, the dream, the desire, the hope, the aspiration to conquer one day and wear the crown.

Is dream an interlude or a full length play? If life itself is a dream what other dreams we are talking about. ‘Tell me not in mournful numbers life’s but an empty dream’- if this be so life is not dream stuff. Dreams are not always empty nightmares. Dreams of light, hope, symbolic solutions to problems and the fanciful exaggeration of absurdity also appear without verisimilitude in the theatre of sleep. Psychologists speak of multimodal simulation of perceptions. The problems bogging us down in our waking life, at times, are resolved through unconscious night visions.  Dreams lend themselves to multiple interpretations. But why should we trust what a person describes of his/ her dreams. Is it possible to remember dreams? Dreams do not have fixed dimensions of time and space.

Dreams are not predetermined screenplays, nor there is a director; unless we accept the theory the dreams are the messages sent by god or devil from beyond our galaxy. Freud said dreams are expressions of our repressed desires. Jung believed that dreams are expressions of mankind’s collective unconscious. Jaques Lacan says dreams are like “a charade where the participants must guess an utterance known to them, or its variant, with sole help of a mimed scene.”  Others say that dreams are the mind’s own device of junk clearance. But theories apart dreams are a part of sleep. An average sleeper has about three hundred dreams whether he remembers or not. During sleep Rapid Eye Movement takes place as the censor of the mind never sleeps. But dream theories can never explain the what, why and when of dreams. Like life, dreams too are beyond what and why.  Dreams have their own causation, their own logic.

Dreams occur. We laugh and cry in sleep. Those who remember dreams they search for the fairies, goblins, gardens, swimming fish, mountain peaks and even mating with beauties of other planets, when they open their eyes. The ‘real ‘ of dreams becomes unreal when the dreamer returns to his familiar world. At times a poet chases his dream in lyrical verse, a painter paints his octagonal paradise on a dream canvas. Often dreams are considered to be premonitions like Calpurnia’s dream. A man dreamt of climbing a peak for a week – and Freud interpreted it as a likely achievement. Yes, he was awarded the Nobel  Prize. Dreams are predictions of things to happen – good or bad. Most Indians say that a predawn dream always comes true. True or false dreams make life saucier.

But what about the day-dreamer! Some call it autistic, others call it idle dreams. Yet there are people who dream with open eyes. They create imaginaries of love; their beloved’s supernal beauty taking them to Cloud Nine, her deep -breasted embrace and tongue clicking kisses in the warmth of a love- bed ; their winning the laurel crowns- and they devote their days and nights to achieve  love, glory, fame and power. It doesn’t matter whether they succeed or fail but they strive, struggle, do tapas and live and die for their dreams of open eyes. Poets, philosophers and even politicians dream with eyes open. No why or what touches them.

Dreams are real as long as they last. And after they make you run, work hard, meditate and make all sacrifices the dreams outlast them. A man who does not dream is a block of wood- a woman too.