Dreams
By Syed Osman Sher
Mississauga, Canada
There is a scene before my eyes: I am present along with others and engaged in some odd work or talking to others. The lines then become distorted and, moving on, they present another picture, an awkward one, making no sense at all. But I do not realize the absurdity, irrespective of the sensation it produces, joyful, painful, dreadful, or even nothing. I take it as real while asleep. This is our dream, and we experience this pattern daily.
In the early evolutionary stage when man had no, or only a little, control over his life, and was tossed upon by the forces of nature, he believed in supernatural phenomena. Dreams were also believed to have similar powers, and had, therefore, assumed immense importance in ancient times. The people took it as a message from the gods, the spirits or the dead, and interpreted it as predicting or guiding the future course of life. This perception forced or motivated people to act accordingly. Considering a good dream as coming from God and a bad one from the Evil, they took it seriously. Therefore, a dream had to be interpreted. The Talmud says, “A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read". It was said so with the conviction that dreams do have meanings. Dreams also got the support of religion, especially due to the dreams of prophets, sages and kings which were enshrined in holy books and became sacrosanct for future generations. This is the reason that the older a religion is, like Hinduism or Judaism, the more sanctity of dreams we find therein. As compared to that, Islam, for example, a relatively younger religion, does not seem to attach much importance to it. However, the Qur’an dwells on narrating some of the dreams or visions of some prophets .
As the time progressed and human knowledge advanced, the man developed a method of scientific explanation and a taste for logical thinking about the phenomena taking place around him. With this the supernatural character of dream lost its lustre. It is now being taken as the product of one’s own ideas, behaviours and experiences. In modern times, therefore, it has become a subject of study under the discipline of psychology. Many social scientists have propounded various theories relating to this human behaviour. The pioneer and the most famous among them is the 19 th century psychotherapist, Sigmund Freud, who centres the dream and its occurrence round the unconscious desires and fantasies that have not been fulfilled, and which are mainly related to the early childhood memories. He has, however, admitted that in addition to their latent content, dreams have also manifest content which is superficial or meaningless.
A number of other scholars of psychology like Carl Jung, Alfred Adler and Fritz Perls, projecting the theory of Freud, have taken dreams as messages to reslove emotional stresses created by problems, fears or wishes that have been earlier either ignored or supressed. Recurrence of dreams with the same theme means that the issue has been neglected and as such it needed attention. According to them, a person in the dream or even an inanimate object, represents an aspect of the dreamer. But there are other psychoanalysts like Flanagan and Hobson, who claim that dreams have no adaptive function and are a “free ride on a system designed to think and to sleep”. They have no significant influence on the dreamer’s waking action and on the performance of his daily routine. In other words, a dream is an epiphenomenon, meaning that it can be caused by primary phenomena, but cannot affect a primary phenomenon.
Truly, dreams are the outcome of our own experiences, feelings, passions, fears and ideas, and are thus related to ourselves. They emanate from our own lives. We dream about our family, friend, relationship, profession and our own environment. A farmer has dreams about farms and farming activities, not about high politics of his country. So is the case vice versa with the president or prime minister of a country. A dream can be interpreted only in terms of what have been the experiences of the dreamer which have moved him to muse over those things. A person who has retired often dreams about his past profession, job responsibilities, office set-up, colleagues, etc. Such dreams do not have any meaning for his present or future life.
A dream in one’s sleep is no more than like his fleeting thoughts while awake. It is a hologram presentation thereof in a slumberous state triggered by his own thinking, albeit with little scope for manipulating. The moment we get ready for sleep, different ideas or scenes come to our mind. As we start slipping into the realm of sleep that thinking process turns slowly into dreams. While awake we have full control on our thoughts, but as soon as we enter into the domain of non-wakefulness, we lose control on our ideas and they are on their own; they have a free ride. This is why they often come up twisted and incoherent with no meaning at all.
In no better way could this be explained than what the great Urdu poet, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, had said:
Thaa khwaab main khayal ko tujh say muamla
Jab aankh khul gayee na ziyan tha na sood tha
In the dream, my thoughts had rendezvous with you
But as the eyes opened, it was a matter of no loss-no gain.
