Dreams and Reality..

What do you make of your dreams?

Several people try to interpret their dreams, that is, if they can remember their dreams.

Throughout a lifetime, there are perhaps a handful of dreams that people remember for a long time. A dream might have been extremely dreadful, pleasurable, memorable for the actors in the dream, etc.

But, do you ever think of dreams as carrying any value beyond just your own subconscious imagination playing out in some random order?

Here are some observations on the characteristics of dreams (before I get into arguments on whether dreams might correlate to reality):

1. Dreams seem not to follow earth time
• How often have you gone to sleep and woken up after 8 hours, wondering how that short sequence that played out in your dream had lasted so long?
2. Actors in dreams
• Several of my dreams have involved actors from my own life. Friends, family members, etc. Sometimes actors have the appearance of a friend or family member but may play an entirely different 'character'.
3. Real experiences
• A friend once described how he dreamed of coconut chutney and how when he woke up he still had the taste in his mouth. Clearly, while the dream may have been all virtual, the experience was as real for him as eating a spoonful of coconut chutney. 
4. Nightmares
• A lot of us remember dreams because they had a scary sequence. We feel real fear, sometimes sweat and shriek for real, and ultimately wake up to relief.
5. No rules or logic
• If you try to piece together your dream, based on what you remember of it, you may only remember bits and pieces. Sometimes, we remember nothing (which perhaps indicates deep sleep, which is good!). Most of my dreams make so sense. Either the location, or the people, the dresses, the situation - so many things about my dreams make no sense.

The Dwaita Vedic school of thought lays out dreams as being one of the tools that Brahman (God) uses to give souls different kinds of experiences. Real-life experience, ones that we experience in our waking state, are what they are. However, our dreams many a time surpass our worst waking state experience.

If you believe in God, Brahman's use of dream as a tool becomes easy to appreciate. If God can put non-earth space and time into play for an individual's dream, then He does not have to apply rules and logic the way He does for the real world we inhabit. A range of experiences can be administered to the soul, hastening its journey through the cycle of birth and death. Belief in a compassionate God may also help one see dreams as being easier punishments to one's sins.

Whatever you make of schools of thought such as these, and your level of theistic fervour, that dreams provide us real experiences is undeniable. That dreams are entirely due to one's imagination is difficult for me to believe.

By the way, we've not discussed our own actions in our dreams - whether we are accountable for them or not in some way (perhaps in the court of Yama?), etc. We've also not included day dreaming our discussion here, for obvious reasons, since they occur in more or less a waking state.

There is a somewhat tangential example from a Purana (I don't remember which, but I remember this from researching the topic of Kali) where a lady is tricked into believing that an impostor was her husband, and they proceed to make love. The child thus born is considered to be the true husband's son, according to the Purana, since the wife was imaging that it was her husband with her, not the impostor. Make what you want of this account, but 'dreaming' or 'imagination/attribution' in this particular case indeed equates dream with reality.