PROPHETIC DREAMS

During my formative years at the college i. like many of the young adults did not much care about dreams. We had the whole vast exciting world of action before us and our total attention was grabbed by it. Living life was being practical and dreams were flimsy stuff – just dreams. Later after reading the works of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, my concepts changed. But he too, as one perceptive critic pointed out concentrated only on the darker pathological aspects of the mind. C,G.Jung, his one time pupil later expanded and diversified his study . Soon other schools of thought bloomed.

Let us leave aside those serious academic way of approach. Dreams are a part and parcel of our lives, it is redundant to say.. They are colourful, intricate, fun filled, pleasurable and sometimes very ingenious. And so on. Let me filter down further and choose the particular type of dreams suggested in the title of this essay.

Dreams could be prophetic sometimes. Almost everyone will have come across one such in his life.. My own encounter with prophetic dreams commenced in an innocuous way.

It was somewhere in the seventies. A cricket test match was going on between India and Australia and the next day was the final day. The result was impossible to predict as the scores on both sides were well balanced till then. I had a dream that night where a disembodied voice announced that India would win the match by so many wickets. I told my colleagues about it the next morning. When the match ended in the evening India won the match and by the same number of wickets!

There have been innumerable dreams like this and I have forgotten most of them. But what made a deep impression on me were those dreams heralding messages of death.

It was the year 1986. The month was either late January or early February; I do not remember the exact date. The famous philosopher J.Krishnamurti was on a visit to Bombay to deliver a series of lectures. I had traveled to Bombay and stayed in a hotel. The lecture was scheduled to begin around 6 pm. I had siesta after lunch at the hotel and fell asleep. I had a terrifying dream. I saw the whole earth covered by dark red and black clouds. A voice, deep from the space announced that the J.Krishnamurti had died. Depthless grief spread over the whole earth. The dream was so powerful that I woke up with shivering. Two hours later I went to the venue, JJ School of Arts where the lecture was being arranged. The organizers announced that the series of lectures was cancelled as JK had to fly back to USA on emergency being seriously sick. I felt very gloomy and returned to Hyderabad where I worked. Roughly fifteen days later I read in the papers that the incomparable philosopher had died of cancer.

Another incident was regarding my grandmother. She lived about five hundred from Hyderabad and I had no contact with her for a long time. One day in my dream I saw a big old tree full of branches and fruits. A very ripe fruit from the tree plunked down onto the earth. There was no voice this time. Instantly, while dreaming itself I knew that the ripe fruit was my grandmother. And that she had died. She was nearly ninety.( Note the fine imagery of a ripe fruit.) Do I need to point out that the tree in the dream was the family tree? It could be the tree of life too. Within a fortnight I received a telegram informing my grandmother's death. (Telephones were not so ubiquitous then and mobile phones were unheard of in India.)

From then on , somehow this propinquity of approaching death has got itself attracted tome.

In the second half of 1998 I had a dream in which my mother turned into a ball of light and rolled out of the house through the main door, down the steps , into the street. She died in November. In 1999 I had a dream in which my father too turned into a ball of light and plunged into the backyard of the house. The meaning was obvious to me while dreaming itself. In psychoanalysis, the backyard of one's house represents the subconscious. In the Jungian interpretation it it would mean not only the backyard but also the background.; that is, the SOURCE from which the mind rises. As if that were not enough, three months later, in another dream my cousin came to me carrying the news of my father's death. Actually, a few months later the same cousin came to my house(I worked in a different town) early in the morning (as it was in the dream too.) breaking the news of my father's death. There have been many instances like this.

The last one was regarding my sister-in-law. The dream enacted in detail her death scene, of hear attack. It is too horrible and painful to recount. The actual death took place in 2006, a few months later.

This particular incident was so tragic it shook me up. Now I have come to loathe and fear such kind of mantic dreams.

V.S.SURY

Tags & Keywords : Dreams, psychology,Freud