What are dreams? Are they just random hallucinations produced by the brain? Or, a kind of a computer-like “junking” of all that is not useful or too insignificant to be stored in the brain cells? And are they even important to us?
As we look at the universe and our place in it through the prism of rational science — though science, at its highest level, borrows from imagination too — we tend to dismiss dreams as mere fantasies. The ancients, of course, held a diametrically opposite view. Calphurnia dreamt of Caesar being killed, Mandodari had ill omens when Ram’s army reached Lanka, and all ancient civilizations held dreams to be sent down by the gods, messages of the utmost significance. In fact, in ancient Indian texts, dreaming has been classified as one of the states of being (along with sleeping and waking) and there is an intricate symbolism to decipher dreams, according to the time of the night one has them in. In the Hellenic world, similarly, there were dream oracles and dream temples to foretell war or death or victory or famine. Today, of course, these oracles are the stuff of play, much like tarot card readings that we sometimes engage in to entertain ourselves — or to seek solace.
On the other hand, like Madhu Tandan tells us in her comprehensive work, Dreams & Beyond, there is now a scientific view of dreams too: According to these “hard facts”, each of us dreams a minimum of four dreams a night—even if we don’t remember these—and physiological processes (the firing of cells in the brainstem) rather than psychological or external ones (god) are the reason we dream.
But the problem with such a theory postulating dreams to be meaningless byproducts of bodily processes is that dreams are not random sequences. As any dreamer realizes, they are images unfolding in order. The question is who infuses this order? If we move away from the purely physiological explanation for dreams to the psychological, there is, once again, no dearth of dream studies beginning from Freud who postulated these to be the workings of a repressed consciousness. Then came Jung, Perls, Ullman, Hall and other psychologists with their own dream theories. But Tandan has chosen a vast area of study and she not only explains each of these theories but goes beyond — as she promises in the title — to parapsychology, the more mystical realm of ESP, near-death experiences, premonitions and the like and argues that our dream life may, in fact, point to a life or at least existence beyond what we know.
Tandan is a trained psychologist but here is a work that is not dry or academic in any way. The author uses credible, real-life case studies and even liberally borrows from her own dream diary to present before us various dream paradigms into which different kinds of dreams, ranging from the mundane to the premonitory, can be grouped, and the varying ways in which these can be interpreted following different theories of psychoanalysis. The book not only gives a comprehensive overview of almost all the work done in the field but also shows you how to interpret your own dreams using these tools.
Tandan presents before us each dream theory and analyses its strengths and failings. She argues convincingly that far from being meaningless, dreams are significant — revealing aspects of ourselves, offering solutions (the double helix structure of the DNA was revealed in a dream), and, occasionally, giving us glimpses of the beyond. Tandan writes not just as a psychologist but also a “seeker” in the widest sense — of the meaning of life. She spent several years in an ashram in the Himalayas under her guru, away from city life. She builds this experience into her own reading of dreams and grounds it in Vedic philosophy that sees this entire universe as a dream of Vishnu.
She builds this argument listing dreams shared by those she interviews. There is one by Delhi-based cookbook writer Frenny Billimoria whose daughter died, peacefully, exactly in the manner foretold in a dream by Billimoria’s dead father. There is also Jung’s own dream recorded after he recovered from a life-threatening ailment. Jung dreamt of dying and going to a Hindu temple-like cave far away from the earth in a form where all his mortal concerns were stripped away and he was just a point of consciousness. He saw an ancient yogi sitting outside but was recalled just before entering the temple by his doctor, who too had arrived in that most primal form. Interestingly, the day Jung recovered, his doctor died of septicemia.
The latter half of the book delves into the terrain of such “unreason” — something that a few readers may be disdainful of. Seekers of the mystical, however, will no doubt find it fascinating. But even others may be a little less incredulous because of the solid foundation Tandan lays elsewhere in “scientific” fact and theory.
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DREAMS & BEYOND
FINDING YOUR WAY IN THE DARK
Madhu Tandan
Hay House
563 pages; Rs 395