Royal Road
In the beginning were dreams.
Probably. Or rather, the Creator’s Vision of the Universe, stars, and us, in which His are seconds while ours are millennia. According to Jung, while analysing our dreams, we peer into ourselves, our desires, on which stands ‘today’, and our lofty thoughts, projecting the future into the past whose depths house our quietly drowsing archetypes. A dream is always a mystery. And a multitude of attempts to find the sacred key. The Ancient Egyptians thought
God had created dreaming to show the way to those asleep, their eyes in the dark. Plato maintains dreams are a source of creative inspiration and a kind of enlightenment. Sigmund Freud defines a dream as an illusory realisation of repressed wishes and a chance to sublimate unrealisable desires. ‘Night fantasies are the royal road to the subconscious’. The Talmud, a corpus of Rabbinic literature, has it that an unsolved dream is like a sealed letter from God.
Humanity has always been reverent about its dreams, which is understandable. For, it is in night fantasies that the unconscious talks to us in a language of images and symbols, attracting our attention to what we fly by in the bump and grind of everyday life. It is something like a fanciful multi-universe with a forking multitude of scenes. The Director is The Unconscious. The Playscript is Time, with the past, the present, the future, and the fourth one, of which we know when asleep and forget when awake, concurring. Space and Time run into one another. Meanwhile, either wondrous imaginings, in which we can fly and are happy about it, or terrible visions from Nyx’s special collections are born for us to go through. And all these shows are for only one spectator.
For me, dreams are a bridge over Eternity.
It is the area where the transcendental can become understandable, all things are possible, and even a lot more than that.
I remember ‘waking up’ in the middle of my dream once when I was 13. Perhaps, it was the most important discovery in my life. Reviving oneself inside a night fantasy is the ability to become the God of one’s own reality, imagined though it is. What an unforgettable experience of fashioning a universe, saving, curing, destroying, resurrecting, and handling fates like cards!
And the best of all is the feeling of flying! It’s not as if, all of a sudden, you’d grown wings.
It is all about flying being as natural as walking.
At the age of 14, I learnt to invite celebrities into my dreams. Once, Sir Paul McCartney taught me to play the guitar. On another night, I philosophised with Gandhi. Sometimes, I attracted my friends and relatives to play out some real-life situations. And upon the morrow, I had answers to complicated questions and was fully aware of ways to deal with certain people. I may have wasted that ability of mine on trifles as I can do so no more. Still, those years and that temporary gift taught me invaluable lessons about psychology and helped me develop communication skills lasting a lifetime. That’s why, 25 years later, I’m not afraid to write a letter to the Dalai Lama, or Charles, Prince of Wales.
So, what is the essence of dreams? Is it hidden knowledge or a chaotic and senseless babble of events reflected? Is it signs of prophecies or just a refuse of a consciousness stream?
Is it a blessing or a curse? All of us have their own answers.
There is a parable of gods creating man and wondering where to hide secret knowledge about him. After considering the highest mountain tops, the earth bowels, and the ocean beds, they agreed upon what one of the ancients among them suggested, i.e., placing the arcane lore in man himself. For, he would never look inside his own self. And so they did.
On the other hand, it might as well be the reason why man was granted the ability to see dreams. It may be a way to our inner selves, ‘The Royal Road’. Is this road a blessing or a curse?
Each chooses for himself.
The World Bridge proudly presents Nelle Holmes, a member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and a voter of the Golden Global Awards.
She has had heart-to-heart talks with such cinema celebrities as Angelina Jolie, George Clooney,
Caitlyn Jenner, to name just a few, and written for Vogue, GQ, Snob,
The Rake, The Hollywood Reporter, and Tatler.
Now, Nelle Holmes will be writing The Chronicles of Hollywood, our new column about the life of the main US entertainment industry’s symbol.