{Of all lies, art is the least untrue - Flaubert}



Friday, August 12, 2005

Dreams

Something that is locked in the vast fantasy of our heads and yet to come out is a dream. There are chances that once it comes out of your mind, it may be turn into what it is supposed to be or to something totally different, but most of the times it loses its lustre by coming out of womb. We, the mother of the dreams, bearing the pains of nurturing them, feel, is this my dream, so horribly different from its perception and conception. Dreams walk just one step ahead of us, you can't catch them by running on skates. You can possibly get them if you stand still and let them reveal themselves. When people say 'Follow you Dreams', it looks nice, but probably it has most dreadfully misunderstood cliché, just beaten by the oldie 'Believe in Yourself'. What are we supposed to mean when we say a flamboyant banality like 'Follow your Dreams', is it to follow whatever lead to your dreams, go grab it from neck till they suffocate and succumb to your fist. Before moving on, let me make clear that when I talk about dream, I am not talking about aims, ambitions or aspirations, first of all they stink of corporate jargon and second, dreams are as fragile, as uniquely colored and as elevating as an air bubble ever to share the same closed space as ambition. Aims and ambitions looks only like a constrained/trivial solution of the equation of dream.

For me 'Follow your Dreams' means enjoy your dreams with a responsibility to nurture them, let them grow up in your tiny heads feeding them with some reality so that they can survive on being delivered. But this simplification also doesn't help, especially in those cases where dreams are driven by the labor pains of passion or the other times when your dreams become too heavy to carry, sort of a extended pregnancy with rotten fetus. You need to take it out, at times to save you, other times to relieve you from pain, yet other times to satisfy you. Dreams are born babies only, they have to take the weather by themselves. They lose their form, their baby smile, their innocence very soon and can't be called even a dream afterwards. Its reality, a grain of dust in the enormous stadium with crazy crowd and razzmatazz. Even though your dream is not dead, it is lost. So what you get by having a dream that is going to get lost or turn into a something grotesque anyway. Apparently you get lots of pain and disappointment, but you have your share of, what I can call, happiness, the peaks of pleasure. Dreams teach you to look inside, to create, to understand, to observe the pain, to comprehend the real world, to search for the beautiful truth, to sometimes die in peace, and to live with hidden smiles of the courage that you have ever dreamt !

For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come -Hamlet

4 comments:

Mridula said...

I read somewhere- be careful what you wish for, you may get it. How is that for thought?

anurag said...

Mridula, they must be talking of desire. I would always like to see 'The Dreams' as 'innocent babies', their fulfilment can be either good or bad, but never the intent.

Alok said...

You have brought out a very interesting point here. It is indeed cliched to associate the idea of dreams with aims and aspirations in life...

Dreams should be treated as what they actually are...pointers or else portals to inner life. A better way to understand your real self.

All that talk of "following your dreams" is nothing but flamboyant banality, as you rightly said.

Ram said...

I Disagree.

No life is more tragic than that of the individual who nurses a dream, an ambition, always wishing and hoping, but never giving it a chance to happen. He nurses the flickering dream, but never lets it break out into flame.

Life is just a candle and a dream must give it flame.

Isn’t there a good reason for dreaming? After all, how can we travel any further than our dream?

In other words, if we create and follow our dream, it will create us.

Please don't confine the dream to the ones that we experience in the sleep alone. There are dreams even when we are awake. You might call it as day-dreaming, fantacies or vision. But after all DREAM means Imaginative thoughts indulged in while awake.

When your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme. So, what are you waiting for? Follow your dream!