Dreams are self-perpetuating and many times annoying for they tear you away from the ordinary and make you imagine the unrealistically extraordinary. They make you want to kick yourself for being so stupid. They make you want to pinch yourself awake. Some dreams, therefore, die young with the startled awakening, many linger on with a sweet aftertaste, while only a very few assimilate themselves into our core and yearn for expression. It is these dreams that create the passion for their fulfillment. They move the man to toil and seek and not to yield. They define him and give him self-worth. They are the soul of our bodies—— the spirit that leaves when we are dead. The dead don’t dream.

But to be alive is tough. It requires tenacity as well as flexibility. It requires brick and mortar, and the patience to lay brick upon brick till the last brick overtakes the grasp of the tired arm. Then a scaffold has to be fashioned to reach higher and higher. Ingenuity, effort and plan have to be dove-tailed with each other for the façade to take full form. It is tough; so is life. Dreams never come easy.

To dream is to sleep. It is to shut yourself from the outside world and travel along the terrain of the self’s consciousness. The consciousness contrasts sharply with wakefulness and seems unfamiliar and incredible. The aloneness of journeying through our own self also makes us afraid. We, therefore, refuse dreams. Or worse, refuse to believe in our dreams. That’s why they become bad dreams and nightmares.

There is terror in dreaming. It shuts out the world and creates a scare that is akin to that of a child who is locked away in a small dark room. But once the darkness is got used to, light begins to exist. The apparently cramped conditions yield hitherto unknown space. An exploration begins and a dream is discovered. The magic of the fanciful comes into our hands.

Dreams are not Aladdin’s lamp that can be rubbed once to make a desire come true. They also don’t fall into your lap like a ripe juicy fruit. Sir Isaac Newton had an apple bonk him accidentally but the theory of gravity had been playing on his mind for quite some time. Waking or sleeping, he was moved by the question: why do things fall to the ground? He started on the right trail after the apple hit him and realised his dream of answering the question. He was a scientist. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a poet. For months together, he vainly tried to capture the grandeur of Kublai Khan’s court in verse. He failed. On night, he dreamt about it in vivid detail. He got up and wrote the classic poem.

Dreaming is mining the mindscape. It entails back breaking prospecting, digging through mud and slime of day- to- day existence and travelling down the dark shafts to the core of your being. It is also about believing that there is a little priceless gem that is tucked away somewhere and it is meant only for you. The dream of its matchless lustre shining in your eyes as you hold it in your hand blinds you to the sweat and grime of the toil. There is nothing more luminous in the world than the sparkle of a dream.

Dreams never die. Icarus and his son, according to the Greek myth, were imprisoned. His dream was to be free again. He fashioned wings for his son and he flew for some time like a bird. However, the attempt at flying met a tragic end. The dream did not die. For centuries it moved from one dreamer to the next and each added his own experience of attempting to fly to it. Finally, the Wright brothers made the first aircraft. Dreams are the souls of men. The soul never dies. It seeks fulfillment from one body to another. It is a legacy; even a family heirloom.

But for every individual there is always a pot of gold at the end of a dream’s rainbow. Many of us may travel the whole distance but not find it. Some may. However, this is not the real prize. The reward is in first being seized by a dream and then being propelled by it along the rainbow. The close encounter with vibgyor brings multi- layered hues to life. They are real as well as surreal. They hence have a magical quality to them. Dream is magic. It changes you forever. Change is the biggest prize.

Dreams are intimate and extremely personal. Dreams, when revealed, become caricatures of themselves. That’s why the world mocks at dreams and dreamers. The act of revelation is an act of sacrilege and the defilement lays them open to derisive comment. They become ordinary thoughts that have mud in their face.

A dream is a sensation that can be felt and responded to only by the person concerned. It cannot be explained. It cannot be understood by another. Moreover, two persons may have the same dream but its sensation to each of them is different. In other words, the aspiration of a dream cannot be articulated. It cannot thus be shared.

A dream is not just idle imaging, though the latter is everyone’s favourite pastime. We love to dream of distant shores and grand loves. We happily sleep with dreams of wealth and riches and a better world. Afternoons usually provide us with a range of daydreams. On a full stomach, the fantasy land stretches endlessly beyond the horizon and the glimmer makes us hallucinate. It crackles and disintegrates with the first loud burp. A pipe dream always makes for bad digestion.

Such dreams are impossible dreams. They are an idle mind’s wild conjectures. They die young; they die first. But they do entertain as they are open to playing footsie for a while. There is no commitment in such endeavours as they are here today and gone tomorrow. They are an old man’s incapacitated fancy—- utterly unrealisable.

To dream is to be young. It is about wanting enough to make the ‘world conspire with you’ in its achievement. Dreams make age wither and time stop. They have their own chronometer, their own space. They have a life that is both entwined with ours as well as wholly separated. Dreams live for themselves. But we live because of them. We die because we give up on them. We refuse to be fanciful and young.