What is your idea of Bad Dream?

We see dreams while we are asleep. Dreams are still a mystery for most of us. What dreams exactly are? Why we see what we see in our dream? Those events, people and places that we see in our dream, from where these imaginations come from?

Many people believe that what we see in our night dream is connected to our thoughts about the people we come across and events that happens in our life. Some people also believe in the connection between our night dreams with our desires and imaginations. I would agree with all these beliefs. After all, we see places and people in our dream whom we know in person. Though I have observed that places I have seen in my dreams are mostly built on my imaginations while the people in it are from the real world.

Researchers say that we see more than one dream during our sleep but mostly remember the last one. There are so many thoughts and writings about night dreams available online and in books but I am here to discuss something new something different. Something philosophical may be!

What is your definition of bad dream?

Many people would say that their most bad dreams are those in which they see/experience bad/horror events. Like you see ghost hunting you or you see accidents etc. You got the picture, right?. The kind of dream that terrifies you. Wakes you up in the middle of the night. But after waking up, what do you do? “Thank god, it was only a dream”. These kind of dreams revolve creating a circle of fear around us. Most of the time, they are supernatural or close to impossible events. It may scare you in your dream but finally when you wake up, it gives you a pinch of relief that it was all just a ‘dream’. You know that what you saw is not real and realizing that none of that was true makes you feel good. I think that these experiences makes you mentally stronger. It tells you that what you think as your darkest fear is not real. They do not even exist.

So are you among those people who believe that the above description is an exact idea of their bad dream? Let me talk about this another category of bad dream. Many people might not call it bad dreams but as I told you, I am taking philosophical approach to define bad dreams here.

There are dreams which does not scare the hell out of you but will make you feel happy and satisfied in your dream. You see yourself at the places you have always want to be. But there are so many things in your real life that would never ever let you actually go there. You meet and talk with the people from your past with whom you are not in touch anymore. You experience being with the person you always wanted to be and see all the love and affection in their eyes while you hold her/his hand. May be in the real world, that person may not admire you and you know that it is not gonna happen between you two in reality. You see yourself being students of Harvard University, walking inside the campus and interacting with the brightest of all minds. The place where you always wanted to graduate from but it is close to impossible because you are already graduated from some other university and the time wheel has moved more than your aspirations limit now. You see yourself at same place with same friends where you have spend some of the best times of your life chatting, eating, playing, dancing and what not. The place and time where you can not go back in the real world. During such beautifully impossible dreams, you feel awesome and extremely happy. Those moments in your dream, where you have no regret towards life and all you feel is real happiness. But as soon as you wake up, the reality hits you and it hits really hard. You are all broken as you know that all those happy moments were fake and not real. It reminds you in most brutal way that what you always wanted and what you don’t have, what you can’t have. It breaks your heart and your spirit. Waking up does feel so much depressing. That was my idea of real bad dream and the impossible good ones. The perfect illusion designed to make you feel happy, complete and satisfied for few moments and than shatter your heart into thousand pieces by putting you back into reality.

So what do you think? Which one is your idea of bad dream? The one that scares you in dream but make you feel good after you wake up or the one that make you feel happy in dream but breaks your heart when you wake up.

PS: I would like to express my gratitude to my beloved junior Apoorva Shrivastava for editing this article.