the language of thought

this post is about dreams & thoughts.

but don't worry, its not about your 'aspirations'. nor is it about the contents of your dreams which i propose to analyse. and i am definitely not going to share the details of my dreams and scandalise you in the bargain! :-)



have you noticed that, irrespective of what we dream about, we dream in a particular language? and we normally dream in the language we think in.

now you might say that dreams don't have any language. its only a series of images passing through our sub-conscious mind. but by that logic everything we see in our waking state is also only a series of images. in fact, if we think about it, everything we think about in our waking and dream states are composed of nothing but thoughts. our dreams are also, therefore, a series of thoughts. (for more about thoughts read 'bundle of thoughts')



and we think our thoughts in a chosen language. and for some, this is not necessarily the language you speak in. some of us think in one language and then translate these thoughts into another language before we speak. and therefore, the language we speak most comfortably in is the language we think in. even if you are a multi-lingual person, you would still be thinking in one default language.

and the most amazing thing is that we even see objects in a particular language! because whenever we see anything we always label it and then use these labels to relate, recognise, understand and experience the objects and events revolving around those objects.



imagine watching a 'rose'. in your mind you see a 'rose', if your default language of thought is english. alternately your mind would see a 'gulab' or a 'roja-pu' or a 'rosa-pu' or any other such name depending on your own language of thought!

but then, these are all my own random thoughts (in english :-) ). how about you? what's your language of thought? what language do you dream in?

the fascinating body clock

i'm sure all of you, like i, have had this experience in school. we normally would have to be dragged/threatened/thrashed out of bed, but on the day we are going out on a school picnic we are out of our beds in a flash at some unearthly hour; even if we managed to sleep only a couple of hours earlier!


in fact most of the time, if you've noticed, when we want to wake up for something really important or for something really exciting or something we are looking forward to, we manage to wake up just before the alarm goes off. and this is in stark contrast to the umpteen number of times when we sleep through the blaring which has managed to wake up the rest of the household and some neighbors too!


all of us have experienced this fascinating body clock within us at some point of time or the other. its only recently when i started travelling abroad that i realised that our bodies don't strictly follow the time according to the watches on our wrist but has its own internal clock which is ticking away (like a time bomb?). earlier, i could never appreciate 'jet lag' which is just our body clock trying to sync itself with the watch on your wrist.


i recently learnt that there is a technical term for this internal body clock - circadian rhythm.


this only further reinforces the ancient vedantic pronouncement that time exists only in the mind; and the true measure of time is the gap between thoughts. swami chinmayananda used to say that time can be measured only after the 'second' thought and that is possibly why time is measured in seconds and not in 'firsts'!

(click here for an interesting perspective of time from a vedic standpoint - http://www.templenet.com/beliefs/concept_of_time.htm)