The ghost of value

I had a dream last night. That all the money I had turned into valueless papers and nobody, not even police officers were accepting it. It is not my passion to delve into the interpretation of dreams but this particular dream got me thinking if dreams really mean something. One of my friend's literal interpretation was that something dear to me will turn meaningless. But this is a rather cynical reading of things. Adding more metaphors and tweaking the obvious cynicism can create more mystery and surpass the shallow traps of everyday thinking.

Then there was the pragmatic reading of another friend who pointed out that something like demonetization did happen and it’s the post-traumatic stress that’s causing the dreams. His reasoning is that dreams are a more subtle representation of how events around us impact us subconsciously. Maybe it’s the blessed feeling of nostalgia for demonetized currency which has turned into the cursed feeling of abandonment that releases stress hormones in the neural system… and other neuroscience-based interpretation of dreams. This too appears as a deterministic reading of things, with an embedded aim to corner the non-scientific interpreters of dreams. Adding more mysticism and tweaking the overused words of neuroscience can create a more strange interpretation and will also surpass the deeper traps of everyday thinking.

So I come to the conclusion that it was in fact the ghost of demonetization, an outward force that has caught me off-guard and is using scare tactics to make her felt. The characters in my dream that refuse to acknowledge the currency and its value were the manifestations of the ghost, the demonetized currency was in fact me, struggling to assert my worth and feeling cheated in the process.

The lifespan of certain insects, as I have been told is between 12-24 hours. In everyday life and thought, they cause sufficient discomfort and make themselves felt. They don’t live in my tomorrow, but their ghosts survive, guiding my mortal actions and behavior. Such dreams of yesterday are the ghosts of today, what I refer to as the ghost of value.

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