DREAMS

Dreams- is it not a strange phenomenon? For personalities like Sigmund Freud, dreams are a complicated matter. So complicated that he wrote down an entire book on it, "The Interpretation of Dreams". But what about the layman? What about the child who wakes up in the dead of night clutching on to his mother, and crying all over because he saw a witch putting him in a sack and flying off to deserted cliff? Who makes him understand that what he saw was a nightmare? Or when he wakes up in the morning with a radiant smile, swearing that a Fairy God Mother told him that he was indeed, a prince! Many of us do not even remember what we saw in our dreams the previous night. In today’s world we are so preoccupied with ourselves that we don’t even have the time to dream, literally!

For some, dreams are mere illusions of a better life that we aspire to achieve, but never quite attain. We “dream” of going abroad, we “dream” of earning lots of money, we “dream” of being on Top-of-the-World. I am not saying that none of us achieve our targets. We do. But as soon as our one “dream” is accomplished, we are lining up several other dreams to be fulfilled. We are the perpetual chasers of our own destiny!

And it is this relentless hankering that is finally taking Man towards his downfall. It was the “noble” dream of the Honorable President Mr. George.W.Bush to rid Mother Earth of someone by the name of Osama bin Laden. So he wasted no time in bombarding Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran one after another. So what if thousands of innocent muslims were butchered in the process? Who cares? Wasn’t he doing a noble deed so that his name might enter the history books to be remembered by the future generations? Similarly, it is the “dream” of every mother to see her child towering above everybody else, and she being recognized as the mother of so and so. So what if the “dreams” of the child are crushed under the heavy books. One has to make sacrifices. That’s not a big deal!!!

But should Man stop dreaming? Never. It was someone’s dream to fly with the birds, and we are flying today. It was someone’s dream to land on the moon and we have done it. It was someone’s dream to capture fleeting moments, and today we have more than enough ways of doing that. We should keep dreaming BIG, but should remain SMALL in our hearts like the child woken by the nightmare; so that if ever our mind wanders towards the thought of fulfilling an evil dream, we can be brought back to rational thinking by our conscience.