Man spends his entire life in two types of senses:
- Diurnal senses, or the senses of wakefulness
- Nocturnal senses, or the dream senses
Colors play an equally important role in dreams, just as any act in the world of wakefulness is a manifestation of colors. When we think about something, either we are very much interested in it, or our interest in that thing is at its lowest ebb. If thinking can stay on a point and the impressions become deep, then its manifestation is necessary. It is one of the clauses of the Preternatural Law. No thought can take a material form against this law. Just as in wakefulness a thought manifests when the mind focuses on it, similarly in the case of dreams. We perform all those acts and deeds that we do during awakening. For example, if we see a rose during awakening and the color of the rose interests us, similarly when we see a rose in our dream, the color of the rose is witnessed by us.
Seeing, hearing, feeling, experiencing delight or sorrow, feeling healthy or sick—are common in both types of senses. A person feels weak and debilitated when he sees himself sick in a dream, just as a person feels weak during awakening when he is sick.
Law
It is the law of Nature that life remains active whether man is in the state of awakening or dreaming. The only difference is that during wakefulness, the physical body directly partakes in all the activities, whereas during the state of dreaming, one moves around without involving the material body.
Nothing in the universe is colorless. The universe includes the world seen and unseen—and beyond. When a person travels in a dream, he travels on the earth, sees the sky, ravines and rivers, springs and brooks, oceans and mountains. He sees himself walking or flying in space. And when he happens to see the sky, the moon, sun, and stars are witnessed just as he sees them during awakening. If he finds himself roaming about in a garden, he witnesses flowerbeds of various colors and kinds, water gushing out in fountains, multicolored fish in the water attracting his attention, light and dark green leaves of trees, and fruits like mangoes, guava, pears, apples, grapes, dates, and others. When he sees them, he recognizes them because of their form and colors. When he sees an apple, he identifies it due to its color and shape, and when he sees grapes, he recognizes them by their distinct colors. If he witnesses lawns in his dream, he recognizes them due to their colors. If he dreams that he is having an orange, it never happens that the color of the orange is non-existent. He might see it somewhat in a different color, but he does see it in one or the other color.
This all testifies that the significance of colors cannot be ignored even in the state of dreaming. When we see a Negro in our dream, we see him as black as we see him in wakefulness. And similarly, we see a man having a fair complexion in a dream just as we see him during awakening.
The importance of colors during dreaming can also be judged from this illustration: when a person sees fire in his dream, he recognizes it as fire not only from its color but he senses the heat as well. And if a person finds himself in a place where the snow is all around him, he feels the cold besides registering the white color of the snow. But if he finds a fire burning, in that case, he reports feeling warmth. Obviously, the physical body performs in the material world, whereas in the world of dreams, the physical body is suspended. For a detailed account of these things, please refer to the book Dreams and Interpretation by the author.
Man, actually, is a slave to his desires. One desire follows the fulfillment of another immediately, and it goes on nonstop, unending—so much so that man’s actual identity is lost behind the veil of his desires. It never happens that all the desires of a person are eventually fulfilled. This also never happens that every plan of man has materialized.
Someone once asked Hazrat Ali (رضي الله عنه),
“How did you come to know Allah?”
Hazrat Ali (رضي الله عنه) replied:
“I came to know Allah through the failure of my plans.”
In spite of the fact that not every wish of man is fulfilled and not all his plans materialize, desires and aspirations continue to surround him. That is to say, the material life of man is a series of unending wishes. If one desire is not fulfilled, he begins to chase another. And this is necessary nonetheless, because the ticking clock of life does not stop or wait.
It is man’s basic weakness that he is ever complaining about failures and deprivations, whereas failure and deprivation compel him to take the next step. When a person stops at a point upon failing in his desires, wishes, or intentions, a sense of deprivation prevails upon him—as stopping at a point is unnatural and against the law.
The sense of deprivation is such a tree of disease, whose every branch sprouting from its trunk and every leaf on its branch is nothing but dismay and a grave sense of deprivation. The sense of deprivation results in psychological problems that initially start as mental disorders or derangement, which grow into diseases of various types like tension, depression, schizophrenia, mania, and repetition of thoughts and deeds. When the nervous system deteriorates from these disorders, it falls prey to other diseases like low or high blood pressure, diabetes, cramps, and fragility of bones, etc.
Nature is kind, benevolent, and generous, and inspires the creatures living in the universe to have a peaceful living. When the sense of deprivation prevails upon a person to such an extent that he falls prey to aversion from the world, Nature arranges colorful dreams for him, which is a sort of involuntary treatment for his problems.
One seldom sees colorful dreams, but whenever such dreams are witnessed, it is an indication of the generosity of Mother Nature.
If the brain cells that control the nerves suffer deterioration, are tired, or slow down, then the patient sees the color blue in his dreams—that is, he witnesses everything appearing in his dreams as blue. And if the nerves have not grown weak and the memory is impaired for some other reason, then he observes blueness in the depth of everything he sees in his dreams.
A patient of high blood pressure mostly witnesses red color. But if a patient of high blood pressure sees green color in his dreams, it means that Nature has blessed him with a cure from the disease. But if he witnesses red color, or sees burning flames or a bulb emitting red light, the therapist can easily conclude that the dreamer is a patient of high blood pressure—or is about to become one.
One of the mysteries of dreams is that man witnesses everything, good or bad, in his dreams and is affected by it. Sometimes, one experiences the same during wakefulness that he had seen during dreaming. This also happens: a person sees himself suffering from fever, and when he wakes up, he finds himself actually suffering from fever.
Many people have reported remembering poems after awakening, which they had listened to in their dreams—though they had no taste for poetry. There are instances in history where an illiterate man saw himself in the company of scholars and, upon awakening, was found to be a man of scholarly wisdom.
In the world of literature and art, many such instances are found when the dreamer composed a song or wrote poetry, and upon awakening, they simply penned it down—and it was a masterpiece. Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi had the best of his couplets during dreaming, and he wrote them after awakening. Ibn al-Faris, the great Sufi poet, composed all his best poems in his dreams and wrote them down in wakefulness. Many famous couplets of Shaikh Saadi were also conceived in dreaming. There exist many examples in the fields of art, poetry, and even in science and technology—first the idea was seen in a dream, and then later on it materialized in the material world.
The structure of organic compounds of carbon remained a mystery for the scientists. Whenever someone suggested something, he would come under fire, and the resulting dissatisfaction forced them to pass by that idea—and the journey of quest continued. One night, Kekulé von Stradonitz (1829–96), a German chemist who was working hard on the structural formation of carbon compounds, was preoccupied in his efforts to find the solution to this unresolved problem. When sleep knocked him out, he saw six snakes in his dream, each one holding the tail of the other in its mouth, thus forming a hexagonal shape—which reminded him of the organic compound benzene. After awakening, he proved that benzene was exactly as he had seen in the dream. Thus, the perplexing enigma of organic chemistry saw its solution in a dream. His discovery is named after him as the Kekulé Formula and is also known as the Benzene Ring.
