The interpretation of dreams and other poems

In the early 1900s a man called Charles Seligman carried out an intriguing research project With a team of anthropologists he began collecting the dreams of colonial subjects in South Asia West Africa and the Pacific The British colonisers perhaps also found this a compelling way to understand the minds of their subjectsA pervasive encouragement of our times is that we must dream but Dream has only one meaning We must dream big and then we must convert the dream to reality A dream must be a sort of marketing projection for the future a linear ascent Else it is uselessBut the actuality of dreams is not so cooperative Our dreams churn with secret desires forbidden fantasies rage and fear and wishes Studded with symbols and metaphors they insist we be poetic not literal We dream of skinless elephants houses under water lovers with cold gazes citizenship documents we never find exam papers we never complete ourselves as gods or slaves wounding or wounded living in trees with orioles and woodpeckers cleaning basements with purple fungus our yesterdays and tomorrows sweeping up our present Some people call this churning of the mindocean chaos and advise zyada sapne mat dekhoI know someone who says you shouldnt tell others your dreams because you give them control by revealing a self not yet known to you I think the real power is when they interpret your dream back to you with a flatness that makes you feel trapped and stupid Love can sometimes be that dream I suppose Some people share dreams in order to receive a prediction others to derive one My uncles nanny demanded to be told dreams in order to interpret what number she should play in matka next daySeligman was persuaded by Freudian theory but the dreams he encountered suggested the only Oedipal rage people felt was against colonisers not fathers Servile by day their dreams raged with humiliation and anger against the violence and undermining of colonial rule He also concluded that there was little difference between the minds of different races including the colonising race Its unclear what the rulers did with this data but maybe their dreams were full of anxieties of dissent and seditionDreams continue to be collected Social media keeps asking whats on our minds and refines algorithms harvesting desires from digital farms repackaging it for majority views and selling it back to us as community standards No plushly plump naked bodies not even for arts sake No saying you feel discriminated against Communities are good at imposing standards too After all wheres the place for queer dreams of ambiguous untidy desires if youre always woke na Governments map our minds and bodies to interpret if we are typists or terrorists citizens or antinationals No dreaming up poems of churning feelings No saying in verse that you are miyah No youthfully predictable poems of rebellion on college wallsIn Sankalp Meshrams childrens film Chutkan ki Mahabharat a village discovers their Mahabharat nautanki is being transformed in real life by Chutkans dreams Excited they start telling him what to dream so they can profit from his dreams Soon Chutkan is unable to sleep kept awake by the updates of other peoples dreams And perhaps everyone else is stuck too having given all their dreams away for someone else to fulfilParomita Vohra is an awardwinning Mumbaibased filmmaker writer and curator working with fiction and nonfiction Reach her at wwwparodevipicturescomCatch up on all the latest Crime National International and Hatke news here Also download the new midday Android and iOS apps to get latest updates