What are dreams?

Whenever I think of dreams, a well-known character of literature “Sheikh Chilli” comes to my imagination who was himself a dream from head to toe. Certainly, he would be a source of entertainment for many of us but personally, I am very much impressed by his character. Although he was in the habit of seeing dreams with open eyes, yet he opens the world of action for his readers. He goes to the market with a basket of eggs on his head and thinks about future plans. This is not mere entertainment but a very strong desire to do something marvelous and astonishing in life.

Seeing dreams in life is a compulsory thing for all of us because they produce a stir in us to do something great. These act as a road map for us to follow. The unique ideas in every field are a dream at the very outset. The immortal works of arts, literature, architecture, and engineering were ambiguous dreams in the minds of their creators. Alexander Fleming was working in his laboratory when a fungus dropped in the culture plate, the organisms in the plate died at once. The inspiration that struck his mind bestowed a strange gift to mankind was surly a fulfillment of a dream which he had seen in the labyrinths of his brain very long ago.

Freud is of the view that dreams are in fact our thoughts, desires and longings, which remained unfulfilled, and we in our dreams, like a good poet, see our own created world. When our conscious mind sleeps, unconscious mind awakes and the depressed and broken desires take their entity and we see them, as we wanted to see in our real life. The dreams are pleasant as well as nightmares. It is our inner fear that remains sitting anywhere in our unconsciousness and apparently, we totally forget about it.

Shakespeare also mentions a dream like situation in his world fame drama ‘Hamlet’ where the ghost of his father comes and reminds the young Hamlet his responsibility about taking revenge of his father who was assassinated by his uncle. The ghost repeatedly appears before the young prince and keeps alive the sense of revenge in his heart. This indicates that there would have been a theory in ancient times that the deceased people come in dreams of their family members and instruct them about some particular matter.

The dreams of prophets are not only dreams but also the divine messages, which come true word by word. The dream of Prophet Josef and that of Egyptian king and their ultimate fulfillment is a proof that dreams are not only the random thoughts but having a reality in them as well.

The Greek and Roman people considered dreams as the message from one or many deities. They visited the temples of gods and had dreams, which solve many of their entangled problems. Sophocles in his magnificent drama “Oedipus Rex” creates the situation like this.

The working of brain was searched by Allan Hobson and Robert McClary in 1973 while sleeping. They were of the view that dreams were nothing but the random electric impulses of the brain that took out the images from our memory storage. These images are unable to make stories. It is our waking mind that creates the stories because our mind wants to understand what has been experienced.

At Chicago University in 1953, rapid eye movement was discovered. They divided the sleep into five stages. After the fourth stage, man went into deep sleep. It occurred normally after 90 minutes after sleeping then man enters in REM sleep. In this phase, the brain works in a way as the person awakes at this stage when the sleeping man dreams. Dreams act as safety valve that allows letting off stream, which the brain cannot do in daytime.

Whatever the reasons may stand for dreams, it tells us the complexity of our mind that is the great artifice of our Lord. The fact that dreams affect human life is beyond doubt. Scientific researches have to go much far to prove it. It is quite possible one day they reach to a level when they have scientific reasons for effects of the dreams on human life.