Lucid dreams have their own vitality
Last year I had the good fortune of meeting Mahatma Gandhi. He looked much younger and a lot leaner. With shoulders drooping, there was so much warmth in his embrace. Talking to him was a joyful and liberating experience. He made me so comfortable. I felt I was flying. I was in control of myself. Since I was partly awake, I also saw the difficulties in steering my flight to reach the destination. I visualised the difficulties in remaining afloat, and, on course. I saw the difficulties in following Gandhiji’s footsteps. After talking to him for a couple of minutes I gathered courage and asked, “Many of your experiments with truth may not work if these are performed in the present time. Would you care to revise the next edition of your book, My Experiments With Truth, accordingly or would like to keep it as such?” Gandhiji said nothing nor was he disturbed. He simply smiled. Perhaps he wanted to say that many things don’t change with time. Some truths change with time, but not all truths. Some dreamers can see the dawn before the rest of the world. Gandhiji was such a dreamer. That day I got up a little early in the morning. It was a lucid dream.
Dreams are a way to release our urges and impulses. Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist and constitutionalist Cicero was a vegetarian and a teetotaler. This I am saying based purely on the interpretation of what Cicero said about dreams. He said if you sleep after eating flesh and wine your dreams will be obscure and confused. In this I am presuming that since someone of the stature of Cicero would not have liked to see confused dreams, his becoming a vegetarian and a teetotaler seems reasonable. Our gurus have reminded us that dreams after midnight or in the early morning are ‘truer’ because an empty stomach does not confuse or influence the course of dreams. Taking the clue from our ancient gurus, our dietician friends advise us to take a light dinner, and that too not too late in the night. This, perhaps, is one of the recipes of happy dreams. When we see a happy dream, we wake up in good humour, and our happy mood persists throughout the day. Unhappy dreams make us unhappy even when we know it was a mere dream. Some dreams remain unfinished and so do their translations. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan remained incomplete due to an interrupting visitor. He composed the poem by directly transcribing it from a dream. While he was writing the poem, a visitor knocked at his door. After talking to the visitor when he returned to his desk, he realised that he had forgotten the remainder of the dream. The dream poem remained incomplete. Some people see their departure before actually departing. Abraham Lincoln was one of them. He ‘saw’ his assassination. He heard a number of people weeping, but he couldn’t find the mourners. “It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break … until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered.” There he met with a terrible surprise “a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments”. When the most famous occupant of the White House wanted to know who is dead, he was informed, “The president; he was killed by an assassin”. A loud burst of grief from the crowd awoke the president from his dream.
(The writer is a biotechnologist and ED, Birla Institute of Scientific
Research, Jaipur)
