A dream is a creative sleep. Only creativity can bring transformation, free from any obsession.
The human mind is a wonderland. In a way, it is magical in designing experiences; close your eyes, and you can create a beautiful garden, magnificent castle, or tasty food in your mind, and immediately you feel good. Also, you can create hell in your mind by thinking the opposite. Isn’t it great to have such power of imagination and autosuggestion? But, this power also makes it very hard to decipher the real vs. unreal. Our imaginative faculty works in both—wakefulness and dream state. One is a volunteer, and the other is non-volunteer for most of us.
How do you know that the world is not your imagination? When you wake up in the morning, do you ask yourself, Is this world real or imaginary? Probably, you don’t because others confirm your perception. For example, you see a tree, and your friends sees a tree and tells you the specifications, and you believe them. So, a collective validation becomes truth, and its repetition becomes the reality of daily life. What if your friend imagines as well under some universal laws of imagination in existence? Like, we commonly assume gravity is permanent for shared and practical reasons in day to day life, but it is also situational in existence. Therefore, it becomes really hard for those experiences which no one else can validate for you, how do you categorize them? For example, an immersive, meditative experience. We all are experience seeking beings, and this world is our stage where we work, laugh, play, suffer, and experience, and we believe it is real, but the same can happen in a dream. In waking state, the role of “will” is supreme, and we experience the world while doing a task, whereas in dreams, “watching” is supreme, and we experience the world as a happening to us. In this happening, we can be doing as well, maybe in a passive role.
Truly, we know the world by happening of an experience to us. In this way, dreams are no way less important than wakefulness. Dreams are hidden portals of awareness and are our informers of intrinsic reality. Images in dreams are a response to processes involving our physical, emotional, and psychic levels of existence.
Thinking is like dreaming, but both occur in different modifications of consciousness. Therefore, we end up with a different quality of experience. Thinking uses primarily superficial consciousness and fetches information from the senses and the subconscious, depending upon how deep the level of thinking is. During thinking, our “will” takes a central role, and it is a well-coordinated effort to fetch information and associate images using logic. Whereas in cases of dreaming, the subconscious plays a vital role and brings up information to conscious levels. Because of this, the role of “will” is subdued, although imagination can occur in both modifications of consciousness.
Extreme experiences in life can create a response in the form of mental images. It can be a physical response or due to emotions. It can be the result of a deeper layer unknown to thinking mind. In any case, dreams are doors to deep-seated self-knowledge. For example, if we are hungry, then dreams of food are reasonable. Due to their connection to our subconscious, dreams are helpful portals to
know ourselves.
Even after so much scientific advancement, we know very little about our dreams. Maybe everything is a continuous stream of dreams.
This short poem merely scratches the surface of dreams to inspire the reader not to overlook their importance in self-exploration. It also provides a short comparison between dreams and thinking. This poem indicates few types of dreams helpful in enhancing their understanding. Read it carefully and slowly, as dreams can be beneficial in knowing the deeper states of the mental framework.
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