My dreams....

My dream is to travel on a journey without a destination, to explore and experience wisdom and insights from all over the world, to teach myself ignorance and convince others not to adjust their minds as there might be a fault with reality itself. I aspire to be R.K Laxman’s common Indian man and notice ambiguities that are commonly overlooked, because in them I find plurality of meanings.

My dream is to have the ability to dream more and the power to imagine the unknown. Hellen Keller who was blind and deaf from infancy dreamt of a pearl. This she described as ‘a smooth exquisitely moulded crystal’ with ‘velvety green of moss and the soft whiteness of lilies’. She could never have seen or remembered a pearl, a lily or moss. Yet she dreamt the unknown.

“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours”, sang Bob Dylan. I wish I could slip into other people’s dreams and explore their rendezvous. Since we spend 25 years sleeping and 7 percent dreaming, just imagine all the rendezvous one could make.  

I believe dreams are the initiation of creation. A dream heralded the birth of Jesus and the philosophies of Muhammad and Buddha. Dreams often release the mind to look at things in new ways. It is through a dream that Friedrich Kekule discovered the Benzene ring and Robert Louis Stevenson envisaged the plot of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler wrote: ‘The most fertile region seems to be the marshy shore, the borderland between sleep and full awakening, where the matrices of disciplined thought are already operating, but have not yet sufficiently hardened to obstruct the dream like fluidity of the imagination.’ Those states of limbo between falling asleep and waking up seems to be the most conducive conditions for ideas to outflank the sentinels of common sense.

Dreams are the cheapest form of wish fulfilment. On a sweltering hot day I dream of a cold glass of nimbu pani to quench my thirst and as I wait at the bus stop for the PMT to arrive, I dream of racing off in a steel blue McLaren F1. To blur the demarcation between reality and dreams is my dream. Edgar Allan Poe’s thoughts –“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream” intrigue me. It could be that we dream all the time without realizing it because consciousness makes such a noise. After all day dreaming is also an art, one has to rule out the static and the monotony.

My dream is to dream more and as George Bernard Shaw would say: ‘You see things and you say “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and say “Why not?”