Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Shared dreams?

"Where do you want to go, uncle?", asked my three year old nephew.
"M G Road", I said.  His tricycle was the make believe auto-rickshaw.  He took me around in Bangalore and even to Mysore.

He had created an environment and I agreed to stay in that environment.  To us, the blue tricycle was the black auto-rickshaw and the car park was all of Bangalore.

[Small digression: When I narrated this to my son, he corrected me.  It is not the environment we shared, but the experience or a dream.  So, is the title.]

On a larger, real life scale, we have agreed on everything, I mean everything.  Without that agreement, one won't make sense to the other.

Fire is fire for all of us, the experiences are visions of light, sensation of heat etc.  Before  man tamed fire, the agreed interpretation of fire could be that of a dreadful monster that burns.

There are millions of things that we have unconsciously agreed upon to live as a society.  The communication would break if the agreement wasn't there.  Remember the movie - 'The Gods must be crazy' where a bushmen try to interpret a coke bottle.

What if in one fine morning, we stop recognizing an object?  What if we stop sharing the dream? That would be an interesting ... or bizarre?


2 comments:

(Mis)Chief Editor said...

Definitely interesting...but a bizarre thought! - good one!!

Sridhar said...

I realized that there is a story by Sujata (though I don't remember it in full), where the word 'marriage' in every language doesn't make sense to one average dude. The theory was that this person is a test case for aliens to take control of mankind. I think this story ends with this guy boarding a flight to Delhi - to take control of the country.

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