Mera wala dream

I dream a lot... normally while sleeping (and at times while awake too). My dreams are vivid, detailed and in color. My dreams are normally very happy ones and mostly related to the plot of a book I have been reading or a movie I just finished watching. In them, I meet family, friends (some I have not seen since childhood), and people whom I've never seen before.

Dreaming is a natural thing. I wonder then, why some people do not dream and if and when they do, their dreams are silent. No one talks, no noise, nothing! To understand dreams better, I pulled out my old psycho books and here are some excerpts (now stay focused.. Don't doze off)

Dreaming is the subjective experience of imaginary images, sounds/voices, thoughts or sensations during sleep, usually involuntarily. Dreaming is associated with rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which occur at roughly 60-90 minute intervals throughout the night and which contain the dreams which are the most vivid and most often remembered.

Sleep has been classified into: sleep onset (hypnagogia or stage 1), non-REM sleep (deep sleep or stages 2,3, and 4), and REM (or paradoxical) sleep.

Most scientists believe that dreams occur in all humans with about equal frequency per amount of sleep. Therefore, if a person subjectively feels that he did not dream or that he only had one dream in any given night, it is because his memory of the dream has faded. This "memory erasure" aspect of the dream state is mostly found when a person naturally awakes via a smooth transition from REM sleep through delta sleep to the awake state. If a person is awoken directly from REM sleep (e.g. by an alarm clock), they will much more likely remember their dream from that REM cycle (although it's most likely that not all their dreams will be remembered because they occur in REM cycles, which are interrupted by periods of delta sleep which in turn have a tendency to cause the memory of previous dreams to fade.)

The world needs more dreamers perhaps. If we were all dreaming there would probably be less warmongering and more peace to be achieved. But alas, we live in a world where being a dreamer is laughable, where you're encouraged to bring your head out of the clouds and have your feet placed firmly on the ground so that you are in touch with reality.

Truly if we did dare to dream, would we end up like Don Quixote ... going off on adventures, fighting in the name of honor and virtue, helping the helpless and possibly saving the world??? Who knows, most dreamers I think don't live to tell the tale or their dreaming is cut short by a stab of reality.....

You may say I'm a dreamer,
but Im not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us,
And the world will live as one.

--- Thanks John Lennon