" THE BUSINESS OF DREAMS "

"The business of Dreams"

Last night at 3 am I woke up half way through a  dream. That usually happens with me now as part of the  aging experience.

At that moment (that is, when I woke up) I was trying in my dream to locate someone I had abruptly lost as I  was walking side by side with him,  chatting pleasantly, on a safe but lonely stretch of a rocky path.

That person happened to be  Aamir Khan, the bollywood actor ! 

So when  I suddenly woke up and could not know how Aamir Khan disappeared I felt bad. Just before that talk-and-walk with him,  I was eating a 'maska-pav' (bun with a liberal amount of fresh butter) at a street food stall. He had not joined me. He had patiently waited for me on the other side of the road, both hands deep in his trouser  pockets, reclining against a wall. I had crossed the road to eat muska-pav and he waited for me to finish . . . !

I had paid for the muska-pav and then we were on this rocky path, happily chatting, when he suddenly disappeared. I started searching him . . . and then I woke up with a  start. . . .

My dreams baffle me and many of these dreams are not pleasant.  why do we dream at all when we sleep! Why ?

Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams suggests that dreams are a representation of supressed unconscious desires and motivations. But this particular dream did not fit into his theory. I think I dreamt this dream because I was watching a part of the film "Three Idiots" last evening. There is another theory that maintains that dreams are a subjective interpretation of signals generated by the brain during sleep.

We dream throughout life in what is known as the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) stages of sleep. According to a theory, circuits in the brain become activated during REM sleep, which causes areas  involved in emotions, sensations and memories to become active. This results in dreaming.

Mercifully almost all dreams get erased from memory moments after our waking up. And yet some dreams persist. I still recall a dream of a fat young girl with a very chubby face role-playing bhagwan (lord) Sri krishna (standing cross-legged and playing flute) in one of the interludes in a circus. I was then  five year old  and had visited a circus for the first time in life. I might have  been deeply moved by an altogether new experience of outside world - so the dream must have got engrained.

Writers often spin their stories around dreams. Shakespeare did so with abandon and so did many others. Yes, from ALICE IN WONDERLAND to HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX they have blazed a trail of adventure woven in dreams.

And yet it was a haunting one-liner about dreams that had impacted me the most :

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . . “

. . . .So began the unforgettable classic 20th-Century suspense novel REBECCA of the inimitable Daphne du Maurier . . . taking us on to a journey of intense drama and intrigue !

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