चान्द तारे तोड लाऊ! सारी दुनीया पर मै छाऊ!!
मेरे आगे मेरे पीछे! हाथ जोडे दुनीया भागे!!
Remember this number from Shahrukh Khan Starrer Yes Boss! The song was probably not memorable, but its lyrics are full of expression of that age old boozing of human mind.....daydreaming. A very enjoyable and relaxing activity but certainly not revered as advisable by wiser men.
“Don’t paint daydreams! One cannot achieve success by daydreaming! Don’t build castle in the air, Be realistic in life”...These are part of those pearls of wisdom elders dutifully throw at the young ones as a part of their so called moral obligation. As children we are also exposed to a bizarre story of Sheikh Chilli who was daydreaming about the fortunes that he would earn by selling the glass articles, and was so immersed in the dream that he lost sense of the things around him, and eventually broke those glass articles which he was planning to sell. The morale of the story-Daydreaming is injurious to wellbeing!
And yet it is an open secret that all of us irrespective of age, sex, education, wealth, wisdom, standing in the society etc, frequently immerse ourselves in daydreaming. And we do so for a simple reason....because it feels great to freak out. For few briefs moments may be, but we relish step in that imaginary world of our daydreams. It is the world which may be totally weird, but here you set the rules of the game. You are the writer, director, and actor in this film and it allows you to live a life though imaginary in your own way.
As a great novelist Orhan Pamuk puts it, ‘we build daydreams to please our ideas, to belittle our enemies, to extol something we adore, to delight in speaking authoritatively about something we know nothing, to dream of falling in love, or reading, or engaging with politics, to indulge in one’s particular worries, one’s personal habits- these and any number of other obscure desires are what shape us in ways both clear and mysterious....These same desires inspire the daydreams’
Authors like Pamuk give voice to their daydreams and they become novels and stories. We just enjoy our daydreams for few moments and forget them. But in any case daydreams are really a magnificent manifestation of creative capabilities of human mind.
Daydreaming starts from the early childhood itself. As a child we dream about may be toys, or hunting tiger or going to moon, or becoming a boss of the group of our buddies. As a child our ideas and concepts of the world around us are not formed rigidly and it gives an immense flexibility to our mind. So in fact our daydreams are much more weird but creative. I still cherish one of my oldest daydreams, which I painted when I was six or seven years old. I used to imagine myself as a best cricketer who first hits the century with all sixes that means a century in seventeen balls and then takes double hat-trick.......six wickets in an over. By the way I am terribly bad cricketer, and I knew it even then. But I used to enjoy my success in the daydreams.
As we grow older our daydreams change their complexion and nature. In teenage we start dreaming about our glories to be achieved in future and present life. Daydreams in that age may confer on us various glories right from being a topper in school in board exams to being a Robin Hood style revolutionary to a film superstar and may be a Prime Minister of India. There is generally a lot of romanticism in these dreams. As we get along in late teens or college days the daydreams become more romantic. Rahul, Raj, Priya, Pooja....the characters of typical bollywood films are rolled in daydreams. And there are many rosy, colourful, oozing, moving and shaking daydreams we paint in in that growing up age. We keep them concealed in far corners of memory for they are too private. By the time you start earning and getting settled dreams of big career, social status and a loving, cute/ handsome sweetheart begin to occupy the relax corners of our mind. Once we plunge in the struggles of the outside world daydreams become more practical or say less weird, they also become a source to take out personal grudges, and probably due to politics in all walks of life their complexion also becomes more political, daydreams no longer remain purely innocent.
But remarkably even after one attains so called maturity and hence starts throwing pearls of wisdom to younger ones, daydreams still remain with him/ her. Of course the complexion, frames and character in daydreams undergo changes. Sometimes daydreams become sort of retro dreams, where one plays in mind some event of distant past in his/her life and tries to paint a scene if he/ she had acted differently than the way he/she actually acted.
Yet in any form and at any age daydreams do not lose their sheen or attractiveness. For the simple fact that they make it possible for you to imagine anything which you normally cannot expect to happen. And your believe it or not.....it’s a great stress buster quality of daydreams.
It is not to suggest that we should forget realities of life, or should get addicted to daydreaming. Daydreams after all do not solve the problems in real life. But they definitely provide that little respite which our brain needs after a daylong of struggles and travails. That zero hour when we simply allow our mind to freak out, allow it to do whatever it wants to do is very essential for recharging our batteries. Rather now it is argued that daydreaming is our default mode of thought. Daydreaming is being revered as a crucial tool for creativity, a thought process that allows the brain to make new association and connections. Because in daydreaming mind is free to engage in abstract thought and imaginative ramblings. So when you feel tired and stressed, just lay back, and allow your brain to wander, allow it to paint a rainbow of dreams, allow it to forget all ifs and buts of life....just build a refreshing world of your own step in there be relax and then turn back to the struggles of real life.
Finally if you could make the daydreams more and more innocent, weirder, probably like that of children, the recharging of your mind will be much more effective. It is my personal experience that as you think unlikelier or as you tweak and turn more of the rigid rules of the world you will feel better.
So while concluding this article I am already sleeping into a daydream which anyway would not come true........I have become a very popular author, my stories and essays are being considered as classics......I have become a new star in literature.......oh and probably I have won a Nobel prize for literature..............wow! what a nice dream!!!
