Dreams, the single most eccentric yet capricious, erratic yet sane, vaguely imaginary yet virtually real stew of various random ingredients that are put together by our subconscious and served in a beautiful yet dangerous contraption called our minds. It is when you dream you can actually visualize all the emotions that your mind goes through and your brain experiences but does not always showcase in real life.

In a more literal sense dreams are a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person’s mind during sleep; but to portray dreams in a more creative perspective it is nothing but a grand theatrical depiction with a limitless production budget where you are the protagonist as well as the antagonist, and your subconscious the director and your mind is the set. So it’s ‘Lights, Camera, Action!’ every night, where you paint a diverse genre of multiple stories, skits, real-life experiences and some minute instincts that your brain lets go but your subconscious catches.

We all dream of things that we don’t usually get time to think through in our day to day life. But when we enter the immense world of literal magic we are introduced to the topic in detail with almost real yet highly virtual mannerism.

I have had dreams where I am a character and I feel its entire lifetime experiences, hence time is never a constraint in a dream. So from my personal experience of dreams (and believe me I sleep a lot) I have broadly classified dreams as – repetitive, role plays, astronomically whimsical and nightmares.

We always dream about things that are fragile to our minds; like when I immensely tensed about one of my exams, I had a dream about gigantic books who chased me up and down an unending lobby of an old rustic hotel. Every time I managed to gain some distance I used to come back to where I’d started. It was like I was stuck in a paradox. So however improbable and laughable it sounds, my subconscious had a way of portraying things in this specific manner.

People call me obnoxiously imaginative for a valid reason I suppose. But I have always dealt with dreams as small pathways between my heart and my brain. On the flip side, I had dreams where I saw myself accomplishing things that I wanted to in real life.

Thus, dream interpretation has a lot of importance for a psychology student just on the basis that there is so much that a dream can say about you that even you won’t realize otherwise. However, why is it that we always tend to forget about the specific details that our dreams portray so elegantly?

I looked it up and I found this: ‘Perhaps the most compelling explanation for the poor recall capacity is the absence of the hormone norepinephrine in the cerebral cortex, a brain region that plays a key role in memory, thought, language and consciousness’. However, I wasn’t completely convinced by this explanation. I think it is much more than science and it has a lot to do with the individual’s crux.

Self-discovery is hands down the closest our human minds have come to complete and utter tranquility. There is a reason that great saints and priests have prevailed more than the most influential kings and monarchs. They never had massive legions nor did they have bountiful wealth. All they ever had was a better idea of who they were than the ‘noble’ and ‘great’ kings who gloated in the grandeur of their reality.

So just give a split second every morning and think about what you actually dreamt about and what it symbolizes. It might just make your decisions easier and clearer. And as always, keep dreaming.