Dreams
 


“You may tolerate an unrewarding job, an empty relationship, a wretched state of affairs for years without realizing that it is slowly eating you away. Then your deepest self rebels in a dream. It takes courage to face up to the need exposed in that dream. But once you do, you take a giant step forward and you are free.”
Adibah Amin
 
My daughter asked me the other day, “In what language do you dream?” Since I was in the midst of marking essays (I’m always in the midst of marking something), I answered nonchalantly, “In English, I guess, since that’s my speaking language”. She looked at me and asked, “Are you sure?”

Now that was something to ponder... do we dream in out mother tongue, with the dialects intact or do we dream in the language we speak in?

I for one can never really remember my dreams. As the Malays say, ‘mimpi hanya mainan tidur’ (dreams are playthings of sleep), so I never took much notice of them unless if they were really, really, significant.

The ancient Malays also believed that dreams were meaningful. Some could even interpret them, with hilarious results too! Granny could give you interpretations such as these: Let’s say, you dreamt of a big snake biting your big toe. That meant that you would marry a man of means. But if you were already married, well, that obviously meant something else... and Granny would smile and not even tell you what it meant.

If you dreamt of exchanging rings with a person who was already dead, it meant that you were next to go... (such a morbid thought!)... and if you dreamt of failing an exam, it might just mean that you would probably pass, since you would work harder after your dream of failing, wouldn’t you? Or you could actually fail out of sheer pressure and stress! Take your pick...

But if you were into more modern interpretations, Freud or Jung, would give you totally different interpretations all together.

For Freud, the unconscious or id was primarily the seat of desires and impulses mostly of a sexual nature that are usually repressed by the conscious mind. Most dreams, he believed were simple wish fulfillments or expressions of repressed ideas that forced their way into our consciousness when our egos relaxed during sleep.

Jungian analysis, on the other hand, saw dreams as a compensatory to our conscious attitudes, for they usually occur at a time when the defences we employ to cope with the problematic world are put away, and sleep had opened the door to that other world where all that were unacceptable by the consciousness awaited an opportunity to express itself.

Interestingly, the Talmud says, “A dream which is not understood is like a letter which is not opened”. So it’s always good to try to ‘open your dreams’, to have a better understanding of things, of you and what you are going through.

I asked my psychologist friend about my dreams and she started by saying, “According to Freud...” I cut her off at the ankles with “You can do that with your students, but please don’t use that line with me” She laughed and went on with her diagnosis - my brain was going into overdrive after long days at the office. And my days could be pretty long... According to her, I, unlike some people needed a longer time to unwind, because of too many intense thoughts going through my head.

I don’t exactly know if I’ve been blessed with psychic powers because sometimes I have visions of my dreams coming true. It could be a coincidence, a fluke, a chance but when it actually happens, it always gave me a sense of dejavu. But a lot of people I know tell me that dreams are a good guide to what we want to do in our lives but sometimes did not dare to make the leap.

The best thing to do is to interpret your dreams yourself. Who knows you could be just right because only we understand our own private symbols and what they meant, whether implicit or explicit.

According to Adibah Amin, a famous local writer, the ‘meaning’ may not come to you immediately. But after days of brooding, it may come in a flash followed by a conviction that a certain thing will happen or a certain thing must be done.

But till I can dissect my Freudian dreams, I shall go with Adibah’s take on dreams: “You may tolerate an unrewarding job, an empty relationship, a wretched state of affairs for years without realizing that it is slowly eating you away. Then your deepest self rebels in a dream, it takes courage to face up to the need exposed in that dream. But once you do, you take a giant step forward and you are free.”

So we have a choice, either to let sleeping dogs be, or take the risk to discover and unleash the energy and power of that dream …What ever, I am still not quite sure if I dreamt in English or in my mother tongue...
     
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