My Philosophy of Life - Live Your Life as if it were a Dream.

We all dream …consciously and subconsciously. Dreams have been interpreted by many across the globe; countless attempts have been made to decode the sign language and those bizarre situations and places we find ourselves in, while in sleep. Some say that ‘dream state’ affords us an opportunity to dig into deeper layers of our subconscious mind while others say that it is the time during which our consciousness travels in cosmos and meets other souls. It is also said that spiritual growth takes place during dream time as our soul experiences those subtle elements which our conscious mind is not able to perceive. Many soothsayers, fortune tellers and psychics have been said to have attained a sneak peek in the past and future events, in their dreams. Dreams are, as we all know, primarily of two types – a) involuntary-over which we have no control and b) lucid dreams- where we can control and change situations and events we experience. Sleep studies have shown that dreams, on an average, last only for a few minutes but those few minutes appear to be like a lifetime in the dream state. Why this disparity in time frame? It’s because our physical body exists in a different time zone and on a different level of consciousness as compared to our subtle and non-ethereal subconscious mind. Better still...perhaps there is no such thing as ‘time’. After all who coined the word ‘time’? Man did.

The time that we spend dreaming, can either be blissful or nightmarish, depending on the type of situations manifested in the dream. A horrifying dream rattles our brain to the extent that we heave a sigh of relief the moment we are catapulted to our conscious state. I am sure you can recall such instances when you might have woken up with a start from a scary dream and instantly felt relieved, realizing that it was ‘just a bad dream’. Remember how painful it had seemed to be a part of that reality which you had lived in your dream? Well, that seemingly endless saga of pain and horror that you had experienced in your dream, had in fact, lasted only for a few minutes. Point is....the intensity of our pain is time related- longer the duration of time, greater seems to be the sufferance. Again, it’s just a perception. We tend to respond to our situations in different ways, depending on where we stand and from where we look at it. (Like I mentioned earlier, a few minutes of dreaming feels like hours in a dream state) For instance, in a lucid dream, where we know that we are dreaming, we are aware that all that we are experiencing is not real and consequently it becomes easier to live that dream. When our mind knows that everything around is not real and can be altered the way it wants to, it sends positive signals to our body and we instantly gain control of our situation and our fear disappears. It’s the thought of having little or no control over our situations that makes us feel powerless and vulnerable to negative thoughts and influences. Needless to mention what negativity leads to.

It happens in life as well. We all want to be in control but do we really ever gain control of our lives? No, we don’t. Things that are not supposed to happen do happen anyway, no matter how hard we try to evade the possibility of their occurrence. The only thing that we can control is, not getting hurt or burnt up when such terrible things do actually happen. Now that seems unrealistic. You might say that it’s beyond the power of human mind to stop responding to pain. Well, it’s possible only if you live your life as if you were in a lucid dream and perceive each and every event as an occurrence in your dream. It is a huge consolation to realize that everything happening around you is short lived and will fade away soon like an old memory. Besides, if you believe that you are living in an unreal world which is a manifestation of the reality that you created, all your pain will ebb away and your gruesome situations will stop affecting you the way they do now. It might sound crazy but if you do this, consider yourself having taken the first step towards the path of self-realization and transformation. After all, self-realization, primarily, means understanding the purpose of your existence, besides realizing the difference between the real and unreal. Do I have to mention that the world we live in is not the real world? Since the day we humans set foot on this planet, this world has become a mirror image of our perceptions, our aspirations, ambitions, complexities and negativities. It’s, in short, reflecting the reality we created for ourselves. So why fret and fume for something which is not real in the first place. Someday we might just wake up and heave a sigh of relief for having been released from the tormenting clutches of this nightmarish life and after stepping in to the light, we might whisper…”Thank God it was just a bad dream. It feels good to be home".