Dreams are like a mirror where time's meaningless

Hindustan Times

04-06-2025

Almost all of us have in our younger days rehearsed answers for the next day's exam in our dreams or appeared in dream versions of interviews before they actually took place. Dreams have this way of foreshadowing coming events, particularly if they weigh heavy on our minds. The world of dreams is as eventful, populous and animate as the world in which we live.
Dreams are the common ground where we meet friends, enemies, relatives, people long dead or even strangers. Sometimes, we even meet altered versions of ourselves,doing things we would never do otherwise such as play in the IPL or drive a Ferrari even though we own a less expensive four-wheeler.
The other day, after poring over the adventurous story of Indian Navy lieutenant commanders Dilina K and Roopa Alagirisamy, who circumnavigated the planet in their boat Tarini, I had a dream in which I took to the open seas attired as a buccaneer and found myself repeating their words published in the newspaper of that day: 'The sea was as calm as a mirror… and time felt meaningless.'
Sometimes, it seems the moment we fall asleep some primordial AI invades the deep recesses of the mind to strip-mine and back-propagate our thoughts and produce complex stories and narratives at a speed faster than Grok or ChatGPT.
Dreams not only produce spectacular visions but also cock a snook at the restrictions of the physical world. No anti-immigrant sentiment or law can block an oneiric odyssey to any part of the earth nor can the scientific impediments come in the way of time travel. What's more, dreams come at zero cost.
A well-wrought nightmare produced without any technological or logistical support can give a horror flick a run for its money. It is quite another thing that anything scary or unpleasant can be winked off as soon as we get up. There is also no dearth of people who treat their dreams as a crystal ball where they read premonitory messages about the impending future. Such people often take clues from dreams to decide their future course of actions or take important decisions.
William Shakespeare once wrote: 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.' Quite clearly, he wished to say that dreams and life resemble and reflect one another.
There is no doubt that dreams are an apt metaphor for life because they reinforce its possibilities and richness like nothing else. Seen in this way, days and nights use our minds like a palimpsest, each writing its own script as the sun sets or rises. The varied colours of life get diffracted to paint the pictures we see in our dreams.
Dreams are not an escape route, rather they are a means of negotiating life. They are also the greatest levellers as everyone of us enjoys the luxury of dreams when we go to sleep. Rather than an impervious stone wall, there is a thin sheet of glass between our waking life and our dreams and we keep peering from one side into the other.
We can almost say with the naval officers, who scripted history last month, that dreams are like a mirror where time feels [e-mail]
The writer is a professor at the Centre for Distance and Online Education, Punjabi University, Patiala.