Why do we dream?

“Dream: A series of thoughts, images and sensations occurring in a person’s mind during sleep”

A few days ago, I had a weird dream. I dreamt of a friend that I last met exactly 3 years ago. He is one of my high school friends. We weren’t close but we did have conversations because we shared the same interest which is about religion. In my dream, he was the main character. I’m not going to elaborate into the details of the dream but to summarize the dream, the dream took place at school, he was wearing a school uniform and we did some typical school stuff like attending classes, going to book stores, etc.

I woke up from the dream and ever since that I had full curiosity of dream. What is actually dream? How does dream actually worked? Why did I dream of him although we weren’t close during high school? Why of all people I dreamt of him? Due to that, I spent ample time on the internet searching for the reason. The best thing about internet is you can search even the silliest question and you can still get the answer without being judged. Some people said dreams don’t affect our daily life or dream is just simply random images that play automatically inside our head but for me it’s more than just a series of images that play automatically during sleep.

So, according to my findings (not so deep but enough for me to understand few things), generally we dream of someone that we think often. We think of someone too often that they ended up appearing in our dream. The funny thing about this finding is I have someone that I remember every single day without a miss but sadly that person has never appeared in my dream not even once where as a person that used to be simply one of my high friends appeared in my dream and became the main character.  

The next finding was dream is a representation of our unconscious desires and thoughts. Hmm.. this finding is actually interesting, and it somewhat keeps me wondering about it for quite sometimes. Unconscious desires and thoughts? Well, maybe? Honestly, I used to have short fling on him, but it ended a long time ago like 3 years ago maybe. I used to have a lot of crushes and he was one of them, so nothing was really special about him. He was just one of the flowers that I found interesting and amusing. He wondered a lot just like me but the difference between him and me was he wondered obviously while I preferred to keep my wonders all to myself. I remembered once he was sitting in the class facing the window and he starred at the outside for a very long time. We used to be classmates and he somewhat was sitting near me.

“Why the grass is green?”

He blurted out. I didn’t know whether he was only talking to himself or he was actually asking a real question, but I think I said something, but I couldn’t remember it now. A year passed by and we no longer in the same class. We still met every now and then, but we didn’t talk that much. Well, we weren’t that close to speak every time we met though.

One day, he asked me about something which is written in my Holy Book and I couldn’t answer it, so I asked my religious teacher about it and told him the answer after I got the answer. Since that day, we talked a lot about religion. We weren’t in the same religion, but our religion shares a lot of things in common, so we often talked about those. He told me stories that I had never known before and because of that I realized how little my knowledge is. I am a wonderer in my own way, and I thought I was the only one who’s like that but in some ways,  I found a partial of myself in him. We surely shared a few things in common.

Is it because he resembled me in some ways that I dreamt of him or is there any hidden feelings that I myself do not realize that my brain is trying to tell me? But why it has to be now? There are many questions that remain unsolved and there are many secrets that remain hidden. It’s a good thing and it’s also a not so good thing. It keeps us human as a true wonderer, but it makes us exhausted because some questions are meant not to be answered.

Just maybe I actually miss him, and my brain is trying to tell me that? Although my conscious me isn’t convince with this hypothesis, I actually texted him to find out. The result? I still enjoy his presence even it’s behind the small screen, even after so long of not talking, meeting eye to eye and contacting. The good feeling I had while talking to him few years ago still remain unchanged.

JINN