REM sleep…

It was the year 2008 and I was in Goa, having a nice sun bath alongside the beach. Lying beside me were two absolutely gorgeous European girls, all dressed up in slim bikinis. As I lay down on the beach rest, I noticed that I was out of dry martini and so had to walk all the way up to my new Audi R8 parked across the garden of my beach house…All sounds a bit too off the note…? Well, it’s one of my REM sleeps; I mean rather one of my dreams. Guess most of us end up having dreams every night, some that we like, some that we get terrified about and some that we don’t even remember after waking up. As a very sincere devotee to the concept of ‘sleeping you’re a** off’ I’ve long wanted to put forth my thoughts regarding this thing that we refer to as ‘dreams’.

I’ve come across several explanations for dreams. Some say that dreams are un-fulfilled desires of the heart that find its way out and try to cheat the sub-conscious mind into believing that the desire has been satisfied (That would probably explain the dream that I had about the Audi R8). Not sure how many of you guys have had the opportunity to control your dreams. When I was in my teens, I had this amazing and very useful ability to control my dreams. This is caused usually by a hyper active brain. In other words, even when the body sleeps, the brain still keeps functioning actively and hence realizes the fact that what you’re experiencing is a dream and not reality.

A further step ahead takes you to the point where you can change your dreams and the characters in it, just as if you were playing a game. This is a very advanced stage of mental development and requires some practice and alertness. It also requires a highly mature psyche that is constantly thinking and aware of everything around it from a very high level. This ability is also closely associated with OCD, also called as Obsessive–compulsive disorder, which however, as the name suggests is a disorder rather than an ability. OCD can be in different ways for different people. Some have this habit of counting things or measuring objects that they see in daily life, which is more oriented towards math. Some have the habit of re-checking things that have been done repeatedly, by them. To have much simpler explanation on this, check out movies such as ‘Stranger than fiction’, ‘A beautiful mind’.

I used to have this habit of writing down my dreams as a one-liner’, in case I wake up half way through my sleep. Later on, I used to revise them and try to interpret what they meant. When I was in college, I had this very good friend of mine, who used to help me with dream translations. The surprising thing was that dream translations are quite difficult to do and requires you to know some background too. Most times, our dreams reflect the psychological state of our sub-conscious mind. We also often have dreams of falling down or moving very fast and we end up waking up with a jerk. Some claim that this happens because when we sleep, our mind travel outside the body and when it realizes that the body is about to wake up, the mind travels back to the body at very high speeds. This causes the jerk, which as expected, ends up waking us. People, who wish to know more about this, can check online using the key word ‘Astral Projections’. From my end, I’ll be discussing more on this topic later, in another post.

A much stranger event that I’ve experienced quite frequently is ‘Déjà vu’. For those who haven’t heard this term before, when you dream of something and later on when you see the same things happening in reality, its termed as Déjà vu. Most movie buffs would have seen the same in movies like ‘Déjà vu’, ‘Matrix Reloaded’. Though I’ve tried to give myself an explanation for this anomaly, I still have not been able to explain how the human mind can see into the future, before something even happens. Sometimes it makes me think, if the future is designed already. If so, who is designing it and why? If true, then the story of the Matrix might not be such an incomprehensible fiction after all. As they say, ‘Choice’ might be just an illusion pulled over the human eye to accept the system. This would mean that what happens where, how and when has already been grafted and our lives are just moving along the path. Funny thing is, if this were true, it would also substantiate the stress on fate and destiny across different cults and beliefs, in history.

End of the day, I don’t think many of us would want to break their heads over any of this rather that crash on the bed, after a hard day’s work. But do remember the importance of dreams for our once President Abdul Kalam himself had said “You have to dream before your dreams can come true”…Sleep well people…!!!