What is it like to be free of all the biases, all the idiosyncrasies that plague our vision and distort our ability to see and get to the truth. The mind plays tricks on the the self, distorting reason and judgment. The mind has its tricks of the trade like self- delusions, hallucinations and delirium being the extreme forms of it, self deception through false ego, fear, social conditioning are the other reasons why the mind is clouded. Reason and logic is one way of dispelling the unreasonable. This is but a blessing bestowed upon a few. A majority of us live in a world which is either a creation of somebody else's ambition or a dream which we have composed for ourselves. However good or bad the dream we might nurture it is after all a dream, a projection of how we would want to see ourselves in the future, which means that the present is compromised just to make sense of the future. When the dream is realized we feel the joy of achievement, and then move on to yet another set of dreams. When we feel that we have finally realized our destiny we are worried about the lives of our children and their destiny, driving their dreams and making them see ambition in their lives. Life passes by, the mind still clouded by dreams, biases(both old and new arrived by our experiences during the journey). If our experiences are good(i.e.we achieved what we set out to do) we feel that our presence here made a difference. If the experiences are bad(i.e. we fail to achieve our dreams or the dreams of those close to us) we feel at an extreme that the world is cruel to us or reconcile ourselves to the fact that it was just not meant to be. At the end of it all, when the youth is long past and the end is imminent some try and pass on this advice to the youth - see reason, do meaningful things, do things that make you happy, try and live in the present, and all the numerous things which we failed to do but realized there value only at the fag end of our lifetime feeling that we might make a difference by passing on the acquired wisdom to the next generation. The youth in its brash unreasonableness sees senility in wisdom and follows the same cycle. It nurtures the same dreams, the same stories of achievement and failure repeat themselves. The same wear and tear teaches the worth of those words heard in the youth. But learning is not rote memorizing, learning lies in seeing value in the things that we perceive, learning lies in understanding our surroundings and knowing why things happen the way they do. But this learning is a light with which we guide ourselves through the dark tunnel of the old age when the only bright light seems to be at other end of it. We hurry to pass on this acquired experience to our younger ones hoping that they will be more reasonable then we had been. But some there are who discover the veil and learn what lies beyond what meets the eye. Barring these few the cycle continues...

"Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?"

-A dream within a dream
Edgar Allan Poe