Dreams

I have always been a sleepy head. For me sleeping is the most important thing in life; the saying in Hindi ‘Soge to koho ge’ (If you sleep you lose) doesn’t apply. For me, it’s like eight to nine hours of sleep on weekdays and up to twelve hours on weekends. People ask, “Why do you sleep so much?” I tell them gently that I love to watch dreams. The best part is, I can remember each and every dream I see. I can even recall the dream I had day before yesterday! It’s a gift God has given me. At times it is hard to think of it as a gift, especially during exam times, as the fear of a blank paper comes to me very naturally. My dad probably had it too; maybe it is in the gene pool. What ever it is, for most part of my life, I have enjoyed what I saw.

I recently met a friend of mine - Rajni. She likes to listen to other people dreams and then analyze their “inner meaning”. According to me, everything happens for a reason; if I can remember dreams and love to sleep, I find a friend who likes to listen to them and analyze them. What! Confused? Well, it’s a weird world out there and we play the lead roles.

On one of our outings to CCD (oh for all my Infosys folks, its Café Coffee day and not the CCD, where we put our network/hardware problems) she and I got into an argument about the dreams we see. She was adamant that a person can remember dreams only because he or she is under extreme stress and is unable to have a sound sleep. She continued with the argument stating that we go into an unconsciousness state when we sleep, and people who can remember dreams are in a state of sub-consciousness, and the stress on the grey cells intensifies, and that their mobility throughout over nervous system makes us remember what ever we are stressed about. And I went “This doesn’t happen with everyone!”

God, or whatever the unknown force that drives me, never has made me feel stressed out. I have never felt any strain when I get up in the morning. Actually, when I don’t have nightmares, just the simple dreams, the mornings are lovely. My morning moods are totally dependent on how great my dreams were…

Rajni is those nagging kind of gals (no offense to gals) who do not agree so easily. She kept saying “You will have some sort of fallout in the morning. There has to be fire if you see smoke!” But this is not the way logic works with dreams, my dreams at least.

The meeting ended without any solution; do we see symptoms of stress in the morning if we remember any dreams, or do we not! This thought kept lingering around my mind. How ironical it was– contemplating if I had stress in morning because of my dreams was so trying, I found myself not sleeping that night!

The next day I got up with splitting headache. The whole night my brain was trying to check if I was stressed while I sleeping. It was like my brain was sleeping and at the same time keeping a check on how “the brain” is sleeping… Gosh… Even the medicos won’t know how to (and probably wouldn’t want to) correlate this to medical sciences. Any how, a drug during my breakfast brought my head back from hell. I realized that I need a final answer to this whole mystery of STRESS or NO-STRESS.

“Necessity is the Mother of Invention.” My head was a big mess, so I tried doing some experiment of my own. I called up my family 2 nights in a row, one time intentionally fighting with them and other time just having a casual family chat. The days I fought, I had thoughts of my elder brother and my mom (whom I am more close to) in my dreams. Hope now you see where I am going in this experiment. No? Well, even I wasn’t just sure even after 2 nights.

Gaming freaks like me spend quality time learning how to play new and advance gaming technique. So the next experiment was to play varieties of games and see how my dreams “react”.

Sometimes we try so hard for things and mess up the whole process. Too much violence and bloodshed and long hours on PC wore me out so much that I hardly had any dreams. Too bad, the plan just blew up in my face.

So this time, I called a Gal (okay guys no whistling and all – I fancy her, but right now no sparks…). She and I got in a long conversation about each other’s family and before I went to bed, she said something interesting (sorry, not to be disclosed). The night was one of the best. I was walking all throughout the dream in a park (I am also a nature freak) and a soothing song was playing in the background.

Okay enough mushy talks, back to the point. Now I was sure, that dreams do stress our mind to certain limit. The limit is decided by no one, but us. We are the controller of our own dreams. Well actually, it’s my own theory about me and how I want to see my dreams. Even now, I go around doing some small experiments, trying to mould my dreams the way I want them. They don’t produce a perfect result but yeah, most of the time they are the way I want them to be.

Coming back to my friend Rajni’s thought. I met her again (no not in CCD, it was in the college parking lot) I asked her if she can spare sometime about her theory of dreams and the morning stress. She was pre-judgmental and growled that I would again go against her theory and that she wasn’t interested in listening. But that lasted only for few seconds after what I said.

It was simple to make her understand that the stress she is talking about it nothing but the pressure we put on our self during our working hours. I hardly get this because I don’t have any tension for me to get stressed out. I see and enjoy my dreams, as in the evenings, I tend to loosen myself with evening strolls or a good laugh with friends. TV is not much part of my life (apart from cricket), and I don’t watch too much of “kyun ki saas bhi kabhi bahu thi” sagas. So the stress symptom my friend Rajni was talking about was actually present in me every morning. It was just that the stress levels were so low that I was totally enjoying my dreams. The same level shoots up the roof the moment I go under pressure, be it exams or some fight with friends.

A middle line was drawn between my friend’s theory and the one I postulated. And we were both happy standing on it admiring what the other is trying to show. She wanted to discover the lighter side of dreams. I was not very much inclined knowing the darker side, but one can never admire the beauty of happiness until sadness envelops at least ones.

Disclaimer

The author has used the name of his company during this write up. His intensions are not to harm the name, any of the divisions or any employee of the company. There are no hidden meanings to the usage.