Why do I get bad dreams always?”
— Excerpt of a long letter from a teenager.

I pause my series on voice control to answer this. All real power is essentially “You over You”. The real gift is being able to wave a magic wand on your mind and be who you want to be, think what you wish to think, feel only that which your heart loves to feel.

But you lost those gifts. You also lost the ability to find them. Your mind is largely at the mercy of the market place. You now wander in a thought field created by filmstars and pop singers and you bend over backwards to their opinions and tastes — your field of joy is programmed by 30 second TV spots.
They now tell you where your new G-spot lies. They tell you what you should salivate to, when you should raise your paws like a good puppy and ask for more titillations. They hot stamp their brands onto your subconscious bottoms, and you emerge like branded cattle, strutting and showing them off with glee. Your emotion is the plastic emotion of someone else’s punch line and buzzword.

You convinced yourself of another illusion — that you weren’t “creative”. You surrendered all self-expression to YouTube. Like most teenagers, you now mouth catch phrases that have been mouthed so many times they have become abused and soiled and stripped of true personal meaning. Your thoughts have been force-fed by belief systems you were born to — and are way beyond your rational ability to discern and detach from.
You “consume” pre-packaged emotions of canned entertainment — I can see your laughter is reflexive, and if you hear your own ha-ha-ha carefully, you can hear many hidden strains of nervousness and fear.
And so your life flows along in a knee-jerk kind of creative monotony. Some part of your mind knows that most of this is fake.
That’s why your dreams are different. In your dreams, someone unrecognisable surfaces from the hazy deep. Someone you feel was you, yet looks and feels so very different. In most dreams, you are being punished, being chased, coming so very near to a goal, then suddenly defeated, and your heart rattles to morbid fears, as detailed dream calculations quickly go nightmarishly wrong.
Ever wondered why? Ever thought of the connection between a plastic day and a morbid night? You can’t even answer that really, for the dream dissolves itself into deep forgetfulness every sunrise. But just you wait till tonight. Let the whimper begin! Man. What a sad waste to a beautiful divine day in your life.
How did you allow yourself to get screwed like this? How did you lose that precious gift, which could have made you a master of yourself? When will you ever gain that keen sense of separating fake emotion from the real one, discerning true joy from mere pleasure? When will you ever direct your mind to discover the essential ‘you’ within, and having discovered, remain there for beautiful long moments before you surface to the world outside?
Hold these harsh words close to your heart, dear friend. Sometimes I write like this so you know where you are and how far you must go. This is the paradise we lost and must now regain.
Remember this, your dreams cannot change unless you change the whole of yourself, until you gain true power over your entire being. This is a goal truly worth pursuing. Stay focused. Will catch up again next week.