One day, Raja Janaka was lying on the bed when the minister of state came & exclaimed: “King the enemy has attacked!” Raja Janaka woke up to his glorious surrounding in his room with his beautiful wife sitting on the other end.
He got ready & prepared his troops for the war. In the war, he was heavily defeated with almost all his men either getting killed or captured. The enemy king didn’t kill Raja Janaka but ordered him to go into exile.
Defeated & exhausted, Janaka started walking away from the kingdom, no one offered him any help as everyone was scared of the repercussions of the new king.
On reaching the boundary of his kingdom, Janaka saw poor people standing in a queue waiting for food to be served to them. The time it was Janaka’s turn to get served, the food had finished, there was only a little bit of starch left & he was given that to eat. But as fate would have it, as he started eating, a bird came & splashed into his food. Janaka fell down to the ground in a thumping manner as he was unable to believe his fate.
That’s when he woke up & realized that this was a dream! Amazed at the ‘realness’ of the dream, Janaka started pondering whether his current state with all its magnificence is true or his dreaming state with all the misery is true.
Days passed & the king kept on repeating only one question — “Is this true or that true” (‘यह सच, या वह सच’ ‘).
This got all the ministers super-worried as all the important work of the kingdom was getting stalled. Soon, this news spread throughout the kingdom & people started gossiping (in a bad/funny way) about the king’s condition.
During the same time a sage, Ashtavakra was passing through the city & since he was a sage, he knew everything! Therefore, he decided to visit Janaka & help him resolve his issue so that the normal functioning of the kingdom can resume.
He went to Janaka & told him he knew everything about his dream & his confusion. Ashtavakra told Janaka this: Neither this is true. nor that is true. Only you are true. (‘न यह सच, न वह सच’, बस तुम ही सच’)
I narrated this story in my episode with Rajat Kapoor on filmmaking.
Every time you dream. Let me ask you a question: You never remember the beginning of your dreams, do you? You just turn up in the middle of what's going on. - Cobb from the movie Inception
Raja Janaka’s story has many layers to it but I would like to highlight the “dream” part of it. If you go and ask Janaka when did the dream start? He probably won’t have an answer. Because we really don’t know when the dream starts or how we enter the dream. It’s a concept which heavily discussed in Vedanta and many schools of Indian philosophy. And of course in our contemporary reference in movies like Matrix and Inception.
There is a letter written by Swami Vivekananda to Sister Nivedita on 28th August 1900. (Exactly 123 years ago) I am neither qualified to give a commentary nor I can infer the multiple layers in his letter.
It’s a small attempt to make a poster from it. What I understood is… Everything is a dream. So technically you can change the dream by dreaming of a new dream. This indirectly gives you infinite power to change things. An agency to think and act for a better future. Nobody can stop you from dreaming.
