My Top 5 Novels

One thing that is awesome about novels is that how swiftly they can damage your life. You may start reading one on the start of a weekend before your finals, and if it connects, you get so involved that the marching exams don’t feel so important.. or say fearsome anymore. And by the time you finish reading it, there is not a day left to practice for the last battle where you’re totally expected to be wounded near to death. The feeling that you get at that time is abominable, but I think it’s totally worth the joy earned before.

You don’t realize it, but great novels try to transform you in many diverse ways. When you start reading a novel, your mind creates an imaginary world for you where you’re the main character of the novel. And, just before you’re done reading it, the world that you’re actually living in becomes unreal, and it becomes impossible for you to breathe without the elements of the novel actually present in your surroundings or at-least your mind. And, that changes the structure of your mind, the way you look at things and the way you think. A voice constantly authorizes your mind, trying to take you back to the life of the novel. You don’t realize it because they do it so silently, but you’re enraptured.

This scheme of gradual captivation is very fascinating and addictive, proven by the cruel fact that it keeps calling you back. But, in order to become a prisoner again, the essential requirement is to find the right novel. The one that is capable of executing this beautiful task. And, doing it is not easy at all. Everybody comes into this world not only with a unique DNA but also with different sets of interests. A person may like mystery series and the other a complete book that describes the pretty and ugly parts of life altogether. A person may like a mystery character who’s all genius and serious about his work and the other a character who likes to have some fun while solving cases. So, I don’t really know what kind of novels attract you, but here’s the list of the novels that completely transformed me:

1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien

The title of the novel indicates about the story's main adversary, the Dark Lord Sauron, a magician who had in an earlier age created the One Ring to rule the other Rings of Power as the ultimate weapon in his plan to conquer and command all of Middle-earth. The novel begins from Shire, a land of hobbits, and continues towards the middle earth where the final war for the destruction of the ring takes place. The story runs around the struggles of the novel’s main characters: Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, Gandalf, Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas.

2. Moby Dick by Herman Melville

A novel written in the 19th century in which Ishmail narrates the impassioned quest of Ahab to take revenge from the whale that ate his leg. The novel has the detailed and realistic descriptions of whale hunting and extraction of whale oil, along with life on sea travelling in the search of whales beside a socially and religiously diverse crew, and the existence of God.

3. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The novel is about a cast of characters living in the town of West Egg on Long Island in the summer of 1922. The story basically encircles the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his quixotic obsession for the beautiful former debutante Daisy Buchanan who’s now married to a man who loves money but not more than his wife. The story further proceeds with the passionate Jazz life that Jay Gatsby’s living and how it ends.

4. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Catch-22 is a word in English used for the situations where you’re in a dilemma, anything you do takes you down. This novel is basically about Captain John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier. Most of the events in the book occur while the 256th Squadron is based on the island of Pianosa, west of Italy. The novel describes the struggles of Yossarian and the other airmen in the camp to perform their duties well and return home.

5. The Godfather by Mario Puzo

A crime novel written in the 20th century, about the lives of the members of a fictious Italian Mafia family, headed by Don Vito Corleone, that has settled in New York and become well known. The story deals with the childhood and older parts of the life of the Don and how his son, Michael takes over the control of the family’s affairs after the death of his elder brother and his father. Swinging between the rules set by his father and the harshness of the world, the son who never wanted to be a Don reaches the top most level of the business. The story also describes how it all ended for him.

Thoughts Deciphered into Words by Raja Abdar-Rahman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The Theory of Dreaming

"Have you ever experienced bouncing around in gigantic bubbles in the sky? Have you ever undergone the punishment of a crime you never committed? Or have you ever felt like you've met someone before, when in reality you haven't even seen them ever?"
- - - I'm sure you have!

For ages people have been scratching their heads to discover the real reason behind various sets of familiar and unfamiliar images that are projected in human minds while sleeping. Dreaming has always been a fascinating subject and like all the fascinating subjects, it infects you with the craving to find out more and more about it. However, satisfying that hunger hasn't proven to be an easy task. Since the earliest of times, people have continued to believe that dreams are a medium of connection of this world to that of the supernatural. It has also been believed that dreams are actually the holy predictions of the future. However, no scientific base for this portion of nature was set before nineteenth century, that's when Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist, first got a theory on dreams recognized on a large scale. His theory, called the Freud's theory, suggests that dreams are actually a way to re-experience a moment in the manner that fulfills your desires. This theory has been a base to many researches that are being carried out today. And since then, many learners of neuroscience from around the world have been involved in the process of continuing this quest. Some of them have been trying to find out why do we dream, while others have given all their devotion to conclude the legitimate answer to one of the most convoluted questions ever asked: How do we dream?

Is dreaming a controlled feature of the human imagination? Or is it a self-driven function of the brain? A prominent theory, mental housekeeping theory, proposes that we dream so that the unwanted content can be eliminated from our everyday experiences. This theory basically indicates that dreaming is a self-driven stress removing function of the brain that activates whenever humans do not like the circumstances they're undergoing. Another extrusive theory, activation synthesis hypothesis, suggests that dreams are nothing but mere signals transmitted while humans sleep to gather notions and moments from their memories. And when they wake up, they build a story out of the dreams to make sense out of it all. This theory has been extensively researched upon, and so far, neurologists have come to advocate that dreams have a strong connection with our memories. They say that we have already lived what we see in the dreams. However, this argument does not appease the situations where a person visits the place completely strange to him or does a thing he's never done before. But then again, it's a vast subject and scientists are still progressing towards the perfection of the pursued theories.

The theories stated above are based on scientific method and reasoning, however the following theory was basically initiated by religious thought and is now taken on by a group of neurologists in Australia. This theory (there hasn't been a decided name for it, so let's cal it the dream-soul hypothesis) says that dreaming is actually a process related with one's soul. When a person sleeps, his soul departs the body though still connected through an invisible medium. Now, the person gets to see where ever the soul goes, meet whoever the soul meets (this is how we meet dead people in our dreams) and literally experience whatever the soul goes through in the dream. Have you ever felt like you've been to a place before, when actually it's your first time there? It's because your soul has already been there in a dream. And, when the soul comes back from this expedition, the person is ready to wake up. It is also said that in order for the soul to re-enter the body, it has to find it's way back.
Have you ever wondered why you get so disturbed when someone tries to wake you up from a deep sleep? It's because your soul is trying to find the right way.
And, another extension to this thought is that if somehow the soul does not manage to find the way back, the person enters a stage where he can feel everything but not wake up. This situation is commonly known as "coma". The period a person takes to get out of coma depends on the time his soul takes to get back to the body. This theory does lack the proper scientific reasoning, because science rejects to admit the presence of souls. But, it's still the most intriguing of all and scientists have agreed to excerpt the truth out of it.

Along with work being done on the theories stated above, there are many researches presently going on around the globe to take the idea of dreams to perfection. The neurologists are doing all they can in all the possible dimensions to extract the information. And, they're doing it not only to cool the global curiosity, but also to take proper benefits from dreaming.

Yes, dreams do have benefits, or at-least that's what they say.
In some societies, dreams are used to cure illnesses. In some, dreams can be used to predict the future. These benefits do not seem to exist at all, but who believed in a light bulb before it was brought into existence? Imagine a world, where dreams could be used to make things right. Imagine a world where illusions could be used to construct a better reality. Believe in science. Have hope.

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Help taken from:
http://siivola.org/monte/papers_grouped/copyrighted/Dreams/Dreaming_and_the_Dream_-_Social_and_Personal_Perspectives.htm

 http://www2.ucsc.edu/dreams/Articles/purpose.html

Thoughts Deciphered into Words by Raja Abdar-Rahman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.