The book by Sri Madhava Ashish is a daring one. He not only chose to write on a much-trodden subject but also questions the ‘conventional’ understanding of dreams.

Dreams, according to the writer, can serve as a guide to the soul. The central thesis of the book is a departure from the Freudian postulate of taking dreams as a, “royal road into psychology’s seething cauldron of repressed sexuality” or the Jungian jingle of “oceanic symbols of the collective unconscious”. Not that he discounts their enormous influence but to this spiritualist, the dream is essentially an, “open window into the inner kingdom of the soul”.

The hardcore rationalist always looked askance at the capacity of dream-books to inspire superstition and fatalism among the people;  because to him, a notoriously atemporal activity as dreaming— that led people to believe in its predictive capacity, was a challenge to the fixed regularity of time.

Though down the ages, people seemed to set great store by many almanacs on fortune-telling— with a section on physiognomy— always looking for fixed symbols to interpret their dreams. Sri Ashish warns us exactly there.
There is no such thing as a symbol of universal application. No dictionary of reading a dream and to cross-check the last nightmare you had should be rationally trusted; rather, taking note of a dream and probing its contents can help us to be more keenly aware of our unconscious selfhood.

How should a dream help us to analyse ourselves? Sri Ashish lays down some Baconian principles. A dream helps us to understand other people around us in the prism of our own lives.

It helps us to respond to the call of our higher being to attain growth, maturity and wholeness. It prepares us to face criticism. It also prepares us to descend into, “the lowest and dirtiest regions of ourselves”. It helps us to recognise that the power by which we dream is not merely the result of repressed energy pushing up to consciousness, but also of a need to clean our psychic content— the purpose is cathartic.

The fabled book on dreams that revolutionalised psychoanalysis in 1900– Sigmund Freud’s ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’— which drew enormously on the psychic significance and the symbolic weight of even our most bizarre nocturnal visions, defied history.

His book was not going to be an archaeology of forgotten cultural beliefs but was founded, rather, on the psychology of repression. This was a marked departure, say, from what Thomas Nashe wrote in ‘The Terrors of the Night’ (1594) dismissing dreams as, “nothing else but a bubbling scum or froth of the fancy, which the day hath left undigested”.

The reception of Freud’s ‘dream-book’ charted a plethora of fields— from art to philosophy, anthropology to fiction, theatre to cinema and so on.

A cultural historical survey of the past century has, therefore, come to embrace not only a whole crop of psycho-talk but myriad loose borrowings from the school of Freud and Jung, through cartoons, poems, films, essays, witticisms and anecdotes, and through the general babble of conversation about psychology.

To borrow a phrase from Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ may have reshaped the very ‘soul’ that it seeks to explore. To pursue the Focauldian line one might ask how the notion that we ‘have’ a ‘psychology’ came into being and how the model of the mind or self was discursively constituted.   

Seen in the above light, the trouble with the book by Sri Ashish is its moderating voice and its occasional opacity. It is intended only for the “spiritual aspirant” and reserves a disdain for the “materialistic unbeliever”.

Besides, the book is far too unelaborated to be recommended as a counterweight to the theoretical corpus of Freud and Jung. It raises more questions than it answers, though it casts insightful glances on complex areas such as precognition, reincarnation, out-of-body experiences, death and numinous dreams.

Its exploration of such areas as repressed sexuality and childhood traumas is woefully undercovered. He remains starkly silent about the immense power of dreams as a liberating agent of the soul in its creative manifestation.
Sri Madhava Ashish was originally a Scotsman, Alexander Phipps, before he came under spiritual guidance in India. One suspects he is wary of the western interpretation of dreams because of his borrowed love for India.

Turning back on the ego-riddled human dilemma makes his conclusions look somewhat anti-modern.