Don't try to find Messages in Dreams

When I explained different theories on dreaming yesterday and wrote that all the nonsense that you dream just cannot be a hint for the future, I was well aware of the answer that some people may present to this: not everything you dream is a vision of the future. Only some special dreams give you an insight in what is going to happen and that will still depend on the actions of people. I thought this explanation is worth another diary entry.

Let’s start with the idea that not every dream gives you a hint for what could happen in future but only some selective ones. How would you ever know? Really, I have a wife with a lot of vivid dreams and she often tells me of them. Some of them are completely hilarious science-fiction-like stories with the impossible getting real. Others are however very closely connected to our real lives. She dreams of things that happen every single day or things that happen in our usual surrounding with all the people whom we spend time with. We could very well understand some of these dreams as warnings for the future, if we really would like to live with this funny idea in our minds or in constant fear.

Let me give you an example: She and Purnendu had been to Mathura one day, the next bigger town close to Vrindavan in order to do shopping for this journey in Germany. In the shop that they visited, there was a lady looking at teapots. The salesperson showed her a glass tea set, mentioning that glass now very fashionable. The night after this trip, Ramona dreamed of normal Ashram life and then suddenly she heard glass burst. She runs into the kitchen and sees that one of our cooks has dropped a glass bowl onto the floor which obviously broke.

It was one of these dreams that you forget immediately after waking up but when we were in the office some time later, she heard the cook talk outside and had a kind of a flashback to that scene. I can tell you for sure, if we had any such belief, we would have thought that this dream was a warning because it suddenly seemed all real and connected. But a warning for what? To tell the cook not to drop a glass bowl? Or not to buy one in the first place, as we don’t even use glass at the Ashram?

The right people will now say, if she had not had this dream, she might have gone and buy a set of glass dishes on that day and it would have fallen down. The dream prevented this from happening, telling her in advance that it would not make sense. The dream saved us money and maybe even spared our cook from injury, so we should be thankful to the universe to take such good care of us.

I didn’t believe for a split second that any of this could be true and nor did Ramona. We were laughing when she told me about it and we did say ‘Good that we don’t have glass here, it would all break within two days’ but that is just something very logical. In a big kitchen with lots of dishes and no electric dishwasher, the washing up is a big task and sometimes things fall down. Additionally we always have lots of children at the Ashram which does not lower the risk of glass dishes breaking! Ramona had seen the glass and her mind had subconsciously made the connection that this tea set would not be good at the Ashram. This information was being processed when she was asleep and that’s what she saw in her dream.

It is as simple as that. No warning, no magic, no ghosts, angels or spirits helping us with divine intervention. Just my wife and her dreams.