Nature of Our Reality

The life of a man is a dubious experiment. It is a tremendous phenomenon only in numerical terms. Individually it is so fleeting so insufficient that it is literally a miracle that anything can exist and develop at all.

The excerpt above is from the autobiography of Carl Gustav Jung. The father of analytical psychology. Whose work maybe is the most recognized foundation of modern psychology after Freud. Most psychological thriller movies, books, or anything through the 80s until now has been influenced up to some modicum by his work. But none of it was known to me until yesterday!

For me, in the past few months, life has been a little too slow. Nothing fun to do or to watch has turned me into a sloth. Most of the time I spend nowadays is in a small clubhouse near a river close to my home. An extraordinary place, nonetheless. Yesterday, As per usual, precisely at seven, I took a ride there with a friend sitting in the back while making small talks. Amidst our conversation, he shared something with me to see if I can explain it. A dream he had. A vision to be more accurate as he has experienced it quite a number of times.

The dream takes him back a few years, right before the day his father died. It starts with him climbing up the stairs of their outhouse; The slippery grabrail on the stairs leading up to the doors that are always open. As he peaks inside, he sees a rectangular hole or grave right in the middle of the floor and a man standing beside it. Filled with greenish water, an influx of planktons in it signifies the burial to have been dug quite a while ago. In the dream, he knows it is for his father. As a corpse wrapped entirely with white cloth lay right beside the hole! He is a bit hesitant at first, asking the mortuary's staff that came along about what is to be done. The guy answers that it's okay to bury the corpse in it with all the water. As he looks at the guy who said it, astonishingly, he finds the staff to be his father, looking down, smiling at him! Every single time he dreamt of it to date, he said, it's always his father. Both the dead man and the guy who is supposed to bury the deadman!

It took me a while to process and think of how to approach this meta morphed equation playing out in my friend's psyche. But the more I thought about it, the less I understood. And my search had led me to this masterpiece of a book, 'Memories, Dreams, Reflection' autobiography of Gustav Jung. Same guy as the quote you read above.

He stated, or actually, he emphasized on this one simple idea that how many times I try to wrap my head around, I can't fully grasp it. The thing is, if you start believing in false memories, at one time, it gets so entangled and so immersed among one's own psyche and real memories that it cant be differentiated anymore! Like this woman, a teacher of psychology who deals with victims of sexual abuse. After quite a few years of her practice, she one day dreamt about her father inappropriately touching her! To find out the truth, she went down a path that is a bit darker. She self hypnotizes herself in front of this friend she trusted a lot. Gave the trustee friend a questionnaire which were to be asked after the teacher is deep in trance. The foundings were utterly horrifying for her as the answers confirmed her being molested by her father at a very early age.

When she confronted her father about it, he is put to shame. No matter how much he denied, she stubbornly presented her findings. At the end of this caricature, her father lost almost all of the social recognition and reputation. But it didn't end there.

After a few years of living alone, the father had died. And as more time had elapsed, the teacher decided to write a book, an autobiography to be more accurate. She started going back through her old cases and found something so revealing that it shook her to the deepest of depths. The memory she thought was hers actually belonged to one of her patients! The description is astoundingly similar to her own—a girl who was molested by a pedophile father. Even the explicit details she dreamed about and, as such, were up to the mark! Now she was unsure whether her father was really a pedophile or her mind did something awful to her. In any case, reconciliation was never to happen again; the father had already died.

In such conflicts between fantasy and reality, I, too, have had my fair share of discrepancies. Such issues are sub species aeternitatis. Meaning, the clash between fantasy and reality is universal and bound to occur repeatedly. In my childhood, I once dreamed about a game of 'Gollachut.' Almost like rugby except we have our own spin on it. So, in that dream, after I won, the opponent team captain, My classmate, the first boy in our class, had beaten me bloody because of the anger inflicted by defeat. After that, for 15 years, I didn't talk with him until very recently. And for some reason, a confrontation had occurred, and I realized I punished both him and myself based on a 'false memory.'

Like my friend, I too dream about my loved ones whom I had lost. And like him, I also have a particular one that occurs almost once every week these days. In actuality, the dream is supposed to be based on a distant memory, my first recollection of her. See, my sister was 17 years older than me. And for that reason, she treated me more like her child than her brother. When I try to go back to the first memory, I always go back to a short trek in this small Forrest near my house with her. Golden rays of the afternoon dousing us two through the leaves. The leafy road cutting through the forest leads to a riverbank and where millions of catkins had bloomed. And amidst all that white cloud of flowers, peace await. For this long, This was both my dream and a memory. But after studying the case of that teacher, I am not so sure anymore!

Sometimes we translate the thing happening around us while we sleep into dreams. Like perhaps a mosquito bite gets interpreted as an apparition or a punch in a fight. I wonder, among the things that transpire in our dreams, what flows in reverse to the flow? If something gets translated into the dreams, I wonder what we bring out to our reality!