Dreams

Dreams

Dreams are very different from waking life, but it is extremely difficult clearly to define in what the difference consists. When we are dreaming, we are nearly always convinced that we are awake, and in some cases real experiences have been mistaken from dreams. 
The latter mistake from the subject of a celebrated Spanish play called Life a Dream, and of an amusing story in the Arabian Nights, in which a poor man is for a jest treated as a mighty monarch, and it is contrived that he would afterwards think that all the honourable treatment he had actually received was merely a vivid dream. Sometimes even after waking, we may be doubtful whether our dream was a reality or not, especially if we happen to fall asleep in our chair and do not remember the circumstance of having fallen to sleep.
 Of course this doubt can only arise when there has been nothing in our dream that seems impossible to our wakened mind.  It is, however, only in rare cases that a dream exactly copies the experience of our waking hours.
 As a rule, in our sleep all kinds of events seem to happen which in our waking hours were should know to be impossible. In our dreams we see and converse with friends who are at the other wide of the world or have been long dead. We may even meet historical or fictitious characters that we have read about in books.
 We often lose our identity and dream that we are some one else, and in the course of a single dream may be in turn several different persons. Space and time to the dreamer lose their reality. It is possible in a dream that lasts a few seconds to appear to have gone through the experience of many years.
 The limitations of space may also vanish into nothing, so that we seem to travel the most distant parts of the universe with the rapidity' of thought. Our imagination gains in some cases such complete control over our reasons that we can contemplate all such contradictions to our ordinary experience without the least feeling of wonder. But this is not always the case.
 It is impossible to assert as a universal rule that in a dream nothing, however extraordinary, can surprise us. Sometimes dreamers do have a feeling of wonder at their storage experiences. Nor can we say that moral reasons loses all control in our sleep. 
It does indeed sometimes happen that good men in their dreams seem to do without the slightest compunction horribly wicked deeds, but, on the other hand, even the dreamer sometimes hears the voice of conscience. The origin of dreams may in many cases be traced to internal or external causes.
 Nightmare is frequently due to indigestion or ill-health. When a dream is connected with an external cause, it is often possible to trace some resemblance between the cause and the effect, although our imagination erects a great dream fabric on a very small foundation. 
Instances are quoted of a dreamer who dreamt that he was wandering through regions of polar ice and woke up to find that he had kicked off his bed-clothes; and of another who, going to sleep with a hot bottle at.his feet, dreamt that he was walking over the crater of a volcano. 
The sound of a whistle heard at the moment of waking may make us dream of a long-continued struggle to catch a railway train on the point of starting. In other cases a dream originates in something that the dreamer saw or was. thinking about just before sleep came upon him. Coleridge once fell asleep in his chair after reading how Kubla Khan ordered a palace to be made. 
The idea worked upon his imagination, and the consequence was that he composed a fine poem in his sleep. When he woke up , he remembered perfectly the lines that had presented themselves to his mind in the form of a dream, and he immediately began to write them down. 
Unfortunately, he was interrupted in the middle of his task by a visitor, after whose departure he could remember no more, so that the poem is only a fragment. Not only the imagination but also the reasons has been known to do good work in dreams. There are instances of mathematicians solving in their sleep problems that they had vainly puzzled over when awake.
 All the facts that we have been considering are so various that they chiefly illustrate the extreme difficulty of making any general statement about dreams. They show that in many cases dream-life is very different from real life, and that in other cases 
the mind of a sleeping man works much in the same, way as if he were awake. Perhaps the only definite general statement that can be made on the subject is that imagination even in sleep cannot originate anything, although it has an almost unlimited power of untiring together in more or less unusual or even in impossible combinations that we have actually experienced.
Dreams, pleasant and unpleasant, are indicative of one’s personality. It is so because what a person thinks about usually or what lies in his mind as desires, hopes or regrets is easily reflected in his dreams. So it is with me, and here I shall like to show how my dreams are mirrors in which 1 see my conscious and unconscious desires, regrets and fears, and often a bright, resplendent (impressively bright and colourful) future. 
Firstly, I may describe my dreams related to my desires and hopes. 1 had once desired as a child to be a famous political leader. Now, when 1 am an undergraduate student. I fell that, in my situation of life, I can never become a leader. So, when I lie down and go to sleep, 1 sometimes begin dreaming that I am a prominent member of a national political party and the common people.
 Whenever I travel on crowded roads and through common markets, people on both sides greet me and cry in joy to see my hands, extended out of the car. Some of them come and shake hands with me, and even kiss me expressing the desire that I should be the next Prime Minister. Elections are  held, and in the end, 1 become the Prime Minister. 
The second dream that I often have relates to visit to the most interesting cities or countries. I am very fond of traveling through 1 do not often get enough chances of doing so. In my sweetest dreams, I am often voyaging on the high seas to distant (far-off) islands like Sindhad the sailor. There 1 live in forests with wild people eating fruit and roasted meat and drinking spring water and then dancing around trees for hours on end . 
Sometimes I return home in my dram, but mostly I wake up abruptly (suddenly) when I face a dangerous animal or a group of armed people going to attack me. The third dream that I sometimes have is really very frightful and horrible.
 It concerns,floods brining about large-scale . destruction all around and causing a huge loss of life. In my sleep, I find my house surrounded by floodwater. As the house in at a considerable height, it is beyond the reach of the street water, but I am stranded (unable to go out), and the fear of death with thirst and hunger looks me in the face. 
Somehow, a boat reaches our family wdth some helpers, and we board it. Soon, however, the boat becomes unbalanced and is going to sink that I wake up crying in fear. The fourth dream is perhaps the most horrible, and it concerns flying and forced landing. 
In my dream. 
I fly to far-off places up to Iceland, Greenland, and North and. South Poles, I visit all the advanced countries, but on return to my homeland, the aeroplane engines develop some trouble. The pilot force land on any African seacoast bordering a vast thick forest. Soon some : jungle animals start running towards us, and I cry loudly in fear, and soon fall down on the floor and wake up.