dreamzzz…!

Last night I had it again. Another confused dream. Another torment, another hell. What are dreams meant for? Sigmund Freud said: dreams are the vision of our subconscious mind when it does things that we normally don’t do. Paulo Coelho say: dreams are our connection with the soul of the world, they are the windows to our laid paths. I am confused. Who make dreams? We, ourselves, through our subconscious brain, or the soul of the world?

“Whoever be it, dreams are important, no doubt.”

Yes, dreams do have a connection with the real life, else how would they have made me so uneasy, so restless, that I couldn’t sleep whole night, withering into my bed – waking up every other moment – going by the window and staring out to void – intermittently smoking a cigarette – trying to puff out the helluva gloom – picking up the cell phone and going through all the messages again and again – sauntering across my room – going to the balcony and grope for something in the eternal dark – why the hell would I not have slept peacefully, had it not been to dreams.

“What did you see?”

“A college.”

“And”

“I had gone there for something, I don’t remember now, you tend to lose on links…see…it shows that dreams are unreal…yet so close to life,” I stared at her, protecting my apprehension behind a crafted smile. She didn’t seem to bother. “Someone was escorting us through the campus, and that was a nice feeling, as if I always wanted to go there, and suddenly it was dinner time. But, I don’t know why it was dark there…and we went towards the mess. That was full. We had to wait. Then suddenly we were sitting in the ground before a bunch of students. They were doing something…probably playing some kind of word game. These kinds of games were very popular in my own college. Then suddenly a girl appeared form no where. She had donned a sweater, which had horizontally drawn alternate red and yellow lines…wasn’t it a peculiar color combination?…she had shoulder length slight curly hairs, pulled back and tightened with hair pins, rest of them fell down…and she had a pile of papers with her…she sat in the middle of the play and no one objected…and…suddenly someone from behind us called her by the name ‘Shanti’…she gazed in the direction, past me, at the professor.

“He asked her something about her presentation due tomorrow…perhaps the topic she was going to talk upon. She replied: ‘Whether Indian Petroleum Industry should use advertisements to woo Iran and Pakistan?’…now that topic was interesting…amusing…and suddenly I saw a billboard, right to me, somewhere hanging in the sky that said ‘Mudra Institute of Communication’. I smiled and looked for my colleagues, they had gone…and suddenly Debashish appeared from no where, like a ghost and said that he was going to wait for me in the mess…and he went away.”

“It is like a bollywood movie with few reels missing, but perfectly adventurous, and amusing.” She quipped. She thought I was thinking up all these nuances, trying to buy her time. But I was not. I knew all this was true. But, she wouldn’t believe. She had developed a sense of prejudice that impelled her to think that whatever I was doing was all for her, about her.

Or this sense of prejudice was mine? I didn’t know. Then, there, all I knew was that my dream was a truth; and she thought that I was kidding. Doesn’t life suck this way? Doesn’t it make you too irate to concentrate upon anything particular?

I would not tell her what happened next. I would laugh and wave the stuff away as though it never happened to me.

I did.

But the dream hadn’t ended then and there, something happened…and I went to Shanti.

“Excuse me,” I said. She stopped.

I extended my hands to her, and introduced myself, “Animesh”

“Shanti” she shook my palms and replied tersely.

“well…ummm…I am from Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad, you might have heard of it,” she didn’t seem to pass any clue, I proceeded further, “I did my engineering from there majoring in Petroleum.” That was a lie, I majored in Electronics; I don’t know why I said that, “if you need any information, or insight for your presentation, I might be of help.”

Now that was real foolish. I don’t remember what she replied, but I remember a phone call.

It wasn’t Shanti though. It was from an ad agency. They wanted me to make something new for their new account, ONGC, an Indian petroleum giant. Something similar to what SBI did recently.

“You do everything in your dreams.” She remarked later in the evening.

The Alchemist

What is a dream? No, don’t go to the Great Sigmund Freud seeking explanation and emblem to it. I am asking about your dream. Your own “personal Myth”. Your share in the soul of the universe. Leave philosophies, shun logics and abandon reasons. And then, dream. What you see is your destiny. Your desire. Something that is preserved for you. Something that awaits you. And here is a fable, full of wisdom and simplicity and symbolisms, to make you believe in the impossible that you had once dreamed of but couldn’t dare to pursue.

Paulo’s poetic writing and gritty optimism had made this book “The Alchemist” one of the largest sold novels in the recent history. The mystique and simplicity goes hand-in-hand. God made everything simple, so simple that even a grain of sand can reveal the entire history of the world; but men have a mania to complicate everything; and they endeavor voraciously in evolving an “enigma” out of everything. But at the heart, life remains simple. This is the message of the author.

The story of the treasure-hunt passes through the labyrinth of destiny and omens that helped Santiago, the lead character, tracing out the laid path. He had a dream. A dream that told him about his treasure buried faraway in the pyramids beyond the impassable desert of Africa. He believed and ventured for daring risks. It’s not in the destination that your treasure lies, it is laid all along in the path that your heart longs to follow. So follow you heart; because it is always right; because it suffers; and because it cares; because it has come from the soul of the universe and it is exactly where it will go back.

“Everything has been written on the soul of the world by the same hands” says the Alchemist revealing all secrets in a single line. Alchemist is a person who understands the nature and its language. He is the one who has found the pristine core that runs life into every creation of the universe. The external form may differ, but at the core every thing is same – the elixir of life which cures all the evil. So if, you have found something that is pure, not like an impulse of volcano, you have found your treasure.

Every journey that takes a man to his destiny and fills him with enough courage to renounce everything he possess is a part of the future that he lives in present. And the future is his dream. “When you desire something, the whole universe conspires in helping you achieve that.” says the alchemist. Because, what you dream today would later become a part of your future, a part of your destiny. So, a traveler of dream has not to worry for the path but preserve to meet the target for the path would be laid and revealed through the conspiracy.

What if you realize your dream? What next would you do? The author explains the enigmatic and oracular fear of dreamlessness, too, that keeps men from chasing their belief. He says that we and everything else are subject to evolution, striving for betterment and perfection. Hence, if you heed your heart and the omens you would evolve; and by evolving yourself you would help the universe to evolve for you are a part of it and it is a part of you too.

Sometimes, on the way, you see the vision that pushes you further. And sometimes, you want to settle down and accept things as they come not due to lack in courage but for the feeling of contentment. And this happens when you fear losing something precious, something pure like the soul of the world. Santiago met Fatima, a woman of desert, and fell in love. Love here was a direct nexus between them revealing through their eyes, “because eyes show your soul” and because the whole universe had conspired in their meeting. He felt an immediate urge to stop the hunt and settle down to lead a happy life. The alchemist, then, took the command and explained the monotony of the possible life, a frustration after the denial of “principle of favorability” and persuaded him to have faith in what he had found. Moreover, everything is written on the soul of the world and it will remain there for ever and ever. And love never stopped a man to pursue his destiny. Neither did Fatima.

This is a brilliant novel talking about simple things of life that people have forgotten like, love, traditions, god, and omen and above all dreams. It has a great inspirational power to live the moment, the present and the path abetting you become daring enough to risk for a belief. “And, if a person is living out his destiny, he knows everything he needs to know, there is only one thing that makes it impossible to achieve: the fear of failure” says the Alchemist.

Maktub…

Read a similar story at:
http://www.animesh.org/oeuvre/a_day_after_the_alchemist.asp

Who am I?

ALOHA! I am Animesh. I was born on March 16, 1982, to a middle class banker’s family, in a small town Sindri, near Dhanbad, in Jharkhand, India. Like, any other middle class family, my family, too, was debris of dreams; dreams that were conceived but couldn’t be realized; and as in legacy, I was offered to carry them further. And I did, as they lay my path there-on, as they shaped my destiny there-after.

Dreams beget dreams! Slowly…slowly, the treasury manifolds like an assortment of positive and negative battles, sometimes like slow realm over dust, sometimes like sudden rout after long-fought success. Dreams kindle hope and hope kindles life. Life is an itinerary with hope as its mile-stones, at some you lose, at some you win …and you keep going on and on, conceiving one after another, betting one after another until among those obvious, you find a dream – of much more importance, of much more significance than rest in the flock – suitable enough to bet your whole life upon and then, you decide your destiny.

A layer of dream upon the rubble of dreams! Looks bookish! But this is exactly what my life is all about.

A man has one destiny. And so is mine!

Destiny is a protocol, a destination that emerges when you shape your dreams against the evens and odds of the universe; an adamant idea that you cease to abandon; the ultimate reward you put yourself at stake for. Destiny is one’s own religion, one’s own faith, one’s own cause to surrender. It is the definition of man. he is unique if he makes his destiny unique.

None other than an engineer can really understand the multinomial equation of the destiny, the ever increasing entropy of the dream. I do, not merely because I am an engineer or I believe that I am something extraordinary sort of, but because I chose to pursue such, to understand such.

The world has two types of people, first: a conscious activist, who chooses his steps and thus takes the onus of the consequences, second: an unconscious actor, who lets others decide what should he dream of? Which one is better? … I can not hear a single voice. Quot homines, tot sententiae! No two men can think alike. It is exactly this fundamental instinct of humans – to pretend to differ, to deny others – that has caused a society like ours’ to evolve and to weave us with its multiple forking adherences. Some people choose to govern while some are chosen to be governed. Governance is not of people but of ideas that few have chosen to bestow their faith upon, thus, have colonized the fundamental lineament of humanity.

Who am I then? The former or the later… I don’t know. I really don’t know.

Perhaps, I am an object of the super-class; who has inherited all the public qualities, by default, that he bears at the core of his existence; who has grown inured to the gloom of captivation …gradually after begetting, executing, and terminating… and then again resurrecting; who is nothing but a sound replica of the template code – generated by the routine process of cut-copy-paste.

Or may be, a “human” – a byproduct of a retrogressive alchemy; a settled and quite grain of the finality; a manicured boulder abandoned by nature; an ethnic perennial ruined off by the age-old ethnicity; a kind of a biological fauna, heavy of his past, light of his future.

Or rather, I am a parasite, feeding myself upon the generous humanity and the complacent society; stealing my share of sustenance against their simplicity, against their complexity.

I don’t know!

I may be many. I may be one. Like a cone that remains faithful in one frame but suddenly changes its shape in another – not in a deliberate attempt to equivocalise the truth, but in a normal tendency to cease candidness, to keep from simplicity – I too may be deceitful. I don’t want to become a victim of “TRUTH”; neither would I like to fall prey to the manly strictures. So, I leave it to be answered by my destiny.

It will take time, I know, but I am certain that eventually it will answer. Until then, I will wait. Will you? 🙂