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Chapter 24 - All our doings are disturbances
awake and half asleep, just coming out of sleep. Your memory starts functioning and you catch hold of the last dream that is fleeting by.
If a nightmare happens in the morning hours, then there is a possibility that you may remember it. If it happens in the middle of the night, you will not remember it -- unless it is really a nightmare; something like the concentration camps of Adolf Hitler, or the gas chambers of the second world war. If it is too dangerous, then it can wake you up -- just the very danger of it. But it has nothing to do with death.
It is just your mind which goes on collecting a thousand and one things, unnecessarily. It is a junkyard. You have seen a film in which there are dangerous scenes, you have read a novel in which there are murders and rapes and all kinds of crimes. You have been reading the newspaper every day. All this goes on collecting inside your mind, and in your sleep time, the mind wants to unload itself. Your dreams are nothing but an unloading of the mind.
If you don't collect unnecessary junk, you won't have dreams.
I have not dreamt for years, and not to dream gives a different quality to your sleep. It is light and very sweet, almost musical, a poetry without any words, a meditation of immense silence and serenity.
But your dreams say much about you. This kind of dream shows that you are collecting unnecessary information, and all that gets jumbled, piled up. And your unconscious is not very reasonable, it knows nothing of reason, so everything gets mixed up. These mixtures create nightmares.
It happened that Charles Darwin had become very old and his friend thought, "Perhaps this birthday is going to be his last; we will not be able to celebrate his next birthday." He was feeling weak and doctors were saying that he could not last long. So all his students and all his friends gathered. And he was one of the most respected men of his times; he had given the theory of evolution which had helped humanity in many ways to grow.
Children he loved very much, and the children of the whole neighborhood were
thinking what to present him on his birthday. Finally, they decided on a novel idea...
Charles Darwin's whole life was in studying animals, insects, birds, and he had gone around the world to study all kinds of species and how they have evolved up to man. He wanted to know each step. So the small children of his neighborhood, who were his friends, made a very beautiful present: they collected as many insects as they could find in his garden and they cut those insects -- some insect's head, some other insect's body, some other insect's legs, some other insect's other parts -- many insects they cut and glued them into one, new insect. They did a really good job, and on the birthday when all his great scientist friends were there, they also came with their present and they said, "We would like to know to what species this insect belongs."
Charles Darwin looked at it. In his whole life, he had never seen such a thing. He remembered that he had seen the head... he had seen the body... but not with this head. He had seen the legs, but not with this body.
But he was a genius. He said to the children, "Yes, I know this insect. Its name is humbug."
Your mind creates many humbugs -- a head from somewhere, a body from somewhere, legs from somewhere else, a tail from somewhere else. And then you have a ready-made Osho - The Hidden Splendor
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