What's Meaningful For You?
Note: I
have a major case of arachnophobia.
The intuition was strong. In fact, the strength of my intuition
was strong enough to wake me up from a startlingly clear dream I had so early
in a morning, on a Wednesday. The Intuition was that there was something to
this dream beyond the spiders I saw all over my body. The fear and aversion
that I felt at the feel of spiders, already covering my face, and hands, and
coming after me in a race of unsatiated hunger to terrify, to conquer me in my
sleep, was at its peak, when the intuition hit me. There must be something to this, I heard myself think. I almost
woke up, opened my eyes to the mild light of the early morning sun, and tried
to make myself believe that it was all a dream--just a dream.
Image Courtesy: Google |
I felt a wriggling sensation on my right hand. I shook the hand
violently. The cover fell to the ground. The cover was my fortress inside the
darkness of dizzying impenetrable embrace of sleep. The spiders, with their
hairy, dark legs and an unfathomable dark determination in their eyes, crawled
up my hands. Someone inside me, the detective, the rational thinker, the daring
coward, shook his lethargy off and jumped up to meet the challenge of
deciphering the meaning of the situation. This
must be a dream, he told me. But you
woke up for a short while. That too is true, he persisted. Don’t panic, he said. Some dreams do appear in order to teach you
something. Some lesson, they might carry, he said.
I remember reading something like this in Carl Gustav Jung’s
autobiographical non-fiction, Memories, Dreams,
and Reflections, when I was at the University. Then I thought about the
professor, who never wasted any opportunity to disparage any junior teacher who
got appointment at the University. An adamant bully, he was. I opened my eyes
once again. However it was difficult to open eyes, as a sticky linen-like
substance covered my eyelashes. I felt something moving upward from my jaw
toward my eyes, which must have been moving inside their sockets in the attempt
to see light and to break free from the maddening incarceration of this dream.
Image Courtesy: Viktor. E. Frankl |
I felt the sting of the legs; I counted them. I could not
concentrate. The hair of the legs stung on my face, near my nose. The body
above those legs, on two occasions, slid over my skin, the disgusting roughness
in all details.
NO! I
screamed. On opening my eyes, I found the pale yellow glow of an ordinary
sunlight, neither the glittering gold of a dreamy one, nor a bright fusion of
hot afternoon sun indicating that I overslept. I checked time. I overslept for
30 minutes. That’s OK, I thought. As
long as there are no spiders, 30 minutes oversleeping is no problem.
On the table, the new book came to book review welcomed me. I
had received it the previous day. Time to
start reading it. I opened the first pages. Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl. The preface was written
by Harold S. Kushner, a rabbi, from Conservative Judaism. He effectively sums
up the relevance of Man’s Search for
Meaning and the importance of the idea ‘search for meaning’.
Image Courtesy: Harold S. Kushner |
“The great task for any person is to find meaning in his or her
life,” writes Kushner, in the preface. This quote switched my button for
fascination. Wasn’t it an echo of what the detective in my dreams told me to
look for--meaning? Something had flipped a switch on in my mind. Fear and its
manifestation in the form of that dream about spiders—now I realized. However,
hope and meaning are the two fundamental elements that constitute human
‘being’, the mechanics of Homo sapiens, the built of the innermost architecture
of the spirit.
Yes, I am the one who wrote a collection of short stories on
hope. I am the one who told the world that even on the wall of a university classroom,
there is someone watching and making a tale of everything that takes place. The
painful memories of the past should not bother me anymore. The slimy webs of
the spiders of the past should not crawl near my eyes any more. Boy was I
asleep! I was deep asleep.
But thinking about the spiders...Gulp.
Let’s change
the topic a bit. I will be reviewing Man’s
Search for Meaning by Viktor. E Frankl, shortly.
The book review
is sponsored by Mysmartprice.com
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