Psychorner: Dreams

 Your dreams are dead.

                You want to know something rather shocking? Research has found that 100% of the people who follow their dreams have at some point died. You want to know something even more shocking? Research has found that 100% of the people who have drunk water at some point in their lives have died.

                The point I am laboriously obviously so making is that we’re all going to die. Ergo you can say that we are all already dead. Technically, that makes us walking corpses albeit without the desire to snack upon the craniums of ill-fortuned strangers or dance the Thriller at a moment’s notice. The bad news is that you have to accept that you’re going to be worm chowder at some point but the good news is that, as walking corpses, we have the benefit of not caring that much about death.

Whoops.

                Throw aside notions of heaven & hell and toss aside thoughts of the afterlife for a few moments and waltz with me as I ask you to think of a great question mark, you can think of the question mark as something that hovers just about the clouds, out of sight and willing to hear your wishes though you really shouldn’t expect anything terribly conclusive from it – questions aren’t conclusive owing to the fact that questions are questions, and answering a question with a question is not entirely unlike calling somebody’s home phone and asking them where they are. So, now you have the Great Question Mark in your mind, you can call it the great NOTHING if you feel particularly foreboding today. Before our lives, before we were a single cell swimmingly alongside numerous other ill-fated swimming cells there was the great question mark. At the end of our lives, as we lay in bed wondering why we didn’t eat more pizza or as we face that frenzied emu, we have before us, once again, the great question mark. The great twist here is that the question mark is the exact same thing before and after our lives, a great void of the unknown and thus we can conclude that life ends and begins at the exact same destination. To put this in a grounded example: say you depart from Mumbai for a rather lengthy road trip around the world (your car is capable of turning into a boat or plane when faced with extreme circumstances), though you will not be stopping anywhere for any significantly comfortable duration of time, you will always be in transit. So I assume that you are going to spend a great deal worrying about how things will be once you return to Mumbai, constantly wondering about the time when the entire (highly enjoyable and unpredictable) journey comes to and end and worrying more about what you’ll derive from the journey rather than the journey.
What do you mean ‘no’? Are you not familiar with the volume of people incredibly interested in the end of their lives? People so wholeheartedly obsessed with a destination that they enter a fairyland wherein the road that extends nigh endlessly before them is an immaterial existence. Before I break into more meandering metaphors of the metaphysical, I shall move on.

                Hopefully you didn’t manage to resurrect your views on the afterlife and so on and so forth, so you’d have got the point I’m waxing on about: that life begins and ends in the exact same place, ergo life is in itself nothing but a great big journey – a rather long and winding road essentially. I’m sure we have our fair share of familiarity with phrases that might state that ‘when we are at the end of our lives, upon our death beds, will we hold the people we love and hold dear close to ourselves? Or will we hold the money, the creations and achievements dear close to ourselves?’

                That is, in my highly biased and opinionated opinion, a wholesome bunch of hogwash. Here’s some fun news if you’re about to die with regret: the good news is that you won’t have to regret for very long since you’ll soon be dead, though the bad news is that you’ll soon be dead. So the above quote about holding people dear (mind you, people whose hearts you will be breaking with the act of dying) is really a denial by people – a denial of the sociopath within all of us. Of course, I don’t mean sociopath in the wholly literal sense of the word just as the people who call themselves ‘crazy’ don’t literally mean they’re prone to spontaneously stripping and running in the streets.

                By ‘inner sociopath’ I refer to the little voice inside our mind that has an explicit fetish for hierarchies – hierarchies of needs, personal preferences, personal agendas, personal person preferences, personal person persona preferences… you get the idea. This voice is also the voice of selfishness and the base of most desire, both logical and illogical, and thus a part of our psyche that we are rather used to either trampling or feeding rather excessively. The fact is there exists an unfortunate truth - that we have to be willing to discard people, agendas and societies for some causes – rather than use them as some philosophical and logical shield against our desires.

                Now, do you think of the concept of everyone having an inner sociopath as something a tad cynical? Let me go on a different tangent and instead try a tad of justification by pointing out two of the most delicious paradoxes of the human mind – that we are proudest when we are proud that we are not proud, and at times at our most selfish when we are selfless. I like to refer to the latter as the Grand Martyr Syndrome, or the Greek Hero Syndrome, that our ambitions and desires are blockaded by some irrefutable factor – one that is an immovable object or an unstoppable force and it is beyond our power to resist this dubious factor. It is often an illusion for the purpose of justification, one that focuses not on the road before us but on this glorious destination. A lot like the thing in this article’s title… this thing called a ‘dream’.

Your dreams of extra-terrestrial contact took an ill-fated turn.

                Dreams are whimsical and fanciful creations of our mind – more importantly, they are creations directly tied to little but a destination. Yes, there are going to be more road metaphors here. Dreams generally involve fantasies of an endpoint, a particular state of being or some particular creation/achievement. The dream of being a writer is a common one. Oh, that luscious day where you hit the best-sellers or attend your own book release and cut the ribbon to the town hall and marry the rebel princess. Oh, that nice day when you have written a gorgeous series that is enjoyed by the world and you can enjoy your following of people who enjoy your words. Oh, ah, oh that lovely dream.

                But, look at this road, this long, long road that is not even a conceived factor of this dream, a road that was invisible till you were forced to take eyes off the dream and look at the path that goes there.

Umbrella sure had a passion for needlessly convoluted facilities. 

                But… what if you had a passion for writing, why then there is no distant-but-delicious destination to obsess over, there is only the road. But the catch is that you actually love the road and don’t care a great deal about the stops and checks along the way – it’s the road you’re there for, and you will likely fly past that dream that was there before and not even notice when you became a ‘writer’.

                I have a dream of a world where individuality decides identity and creation, and not nationality, religion, culture and so and so forth. But, it is but a dream. A passion is ultimately what gets a person’s gears turning and what keeps them turning and turning and turning and turning and turning and turning and turning and turning and turning and turning and turning and turning and turning and turning and turning and turning and turning and turning and turning.

Psychorner articles are ponderous ones in which I randomly wax on about various thoughts related to society and the human mind and so on – essentially highly protracted shower musings.