We love watching films. It is a universal liking because it seems so real. The mind likes anything that is real and true. While films and life have many similarities, we can watch this film called life for free. It is neither a slow-motion nor a fast-track film. In fact, this is a film that is free of any manufacturing expense and viewership expense. It is there all the time for us to see—a 24-hour entertainment.
Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. Why do we hear this always and why is life compared to a movie film? Well, if you really watch your dreams at night, they are cut-paste, mix match of all that we see, hear, smell, touch and taste during the day. We are constantly bombarded by information which gets printed in our consciousness, just as a film. This consciousness is a very subtle and transparent screen that allows the light of our understanding to pass through.
If, for instance, you are part of a fight with someone, just see how there is a heated exchange of words. There can be a critical exchange of some facial gestures and body language. There can even be some physical assaults too that end in blows. However, even immediately after the fight is over, where are the words? Where are the facial gestures and body language? Where are the blows? They are all etched in the mind as impressions just as you make relief images on a metal screen.
Now the body, mind and intellect is having a natural vent tube like a pressure cooker. The vent tube releases extra pressure. Same way, these impressions are a heavy unwanted load on our consciousness. So everything gets expressed as a dream. For instance, you spoke to someone with all energy about some instance that happened when you were in college; you were on the phone today talking to someone close to you, yet at the same time, thinking this person really didn’t like you or whatever; just before going to bed, you read a book and saw the picture of a saint’s body that was being taken for burial, and you innocently went to sleep. In the night you will have a series of dreams that you may just vividly remember. All the three different events will have a patchy appearance in the dream—you visit the house of the college lecturer and you get a series of missed calls from your beloved, which you seem unable to attend at the moment. As you are leaving the lecturer’s house, you have to go away from a funeral procession that is ready to be taken off from that place. Dreams are like as though the film director lazily put all the strips of some hard-worked film and by mistake they are all jumbled and appear as one unconnected film.
Not just our dreams, but all the thoughts we think during our waking state are but dreams which have a more conscious and stronger presence. Dreams at night are not in our control, but the thoughts we think during the day and the reactions with actions and words, are purely our own film in the making.
—Swahilya Shambhavi (swahilya.blogspot.com)