It was December 24^th, 2007 and I was enjoying sun, sea and sand during my holidays with my sweetheart Bette Davis in Dominican Republic. It was the first time both of us had been away to celebrate Christmas together. We were staying in the Majestic Resort of Punta Cana. Bette was ecstatic with the décor of the hotel room, the greenery of the gardens and the hospitality of the local people. Resort management had done elaborate preparations for the Christmas Eve dinner. They had made wonderful dishes of chicken, lamb and beef. There were numerous preparations of vegetables and fruits. I was excited to eat mangoes after a long time even though they were a bit green. During that Christmas Eve dinner I shared with Bette that I am inspired to write my new book and thinking of calling it Sharing My Truth . It will be a synthesis of my biography and philosophy. It will be the story of my creative journey of becoming a poet, a humanist and a psychotherapist. Bette had a mischievous smile on her face, the smile she exhibits whenever I share my new creative project with her. She wonders where do I get all this creative energy to start a new project even before the last one is finished. I shared with her that she had been a source of inspiration for me for the last thirty years. She has been my muse as well as my critic, my first reader as well as my editor. She has so many wonderful insights and similarities with my creative personality that sometimes I feel she is my female alter-ego.

          The next morning on Christmas Day when we went for a continental breakfast on the beech, I shared with her that I had a mysterious dream the night before. The dream started with me being in a long room with my mother sitting close to me. Both of us were quiet but peaceful. When I looked closer to my mom, she looked sad. She did not say anything so I did not know the reason of her sadness. Then some people started coming in, men and women, young and old, White, Brown and Black people. Many of them seemed strangers. Those that I recognized were the nurses from the psychiatric hospital I used to work in Whitby. Those people brought food with them that I put in the next room. They wanted to meet my mother. It gradually dawned on me in the dream that they wanted to offer condolences to my mother as my father had passed away. At that time I realized why my mom looked sad. She was not crying. She just looked quiet and graceful. Guests kept on coming in with food and sitting down in the second room. In the dream I felt a bit unsure of my role in the whole process. I was an interpreter between my guests and my mom who did not understand and speak English.

          After a while my dear friend Hildy came in who used to work as a social worker in the same hospital. She said to me, “I can help you do your work”.

“What work?” I asked.

“We have to feed these guests.”

“But where is the food?”

“These people have brought the food.”

So Hildy and I went in the room to check the food. I realized that there was more than one room. There was also a basement. We went into the basement and saw more people sitting there. We wanted to feed the guests downstairs but then we realized that it would be easier to feed them where the food was. So we uncovered the dishes and spread them around. It was a big table. We invited all the guests. Hildy, I and mom sat at the head of the table, mom on my right and Hildy on my left and all the guests sat on both sides of the table. As they started eating, they started smiling and talking. I felt as if I had done what I was supposed to do. I felt happy and contented and thanked Hildy for helping me. And then I woke up.

          Bette was quite intrigued and fascinated by the dream. Like an experienced psychotherapist she said, “ Now that you have shared your dream, can you also share your associations with it. What does this dream mean to you?”

          As I started my free association with my stream of consciousness I shared with her that the dream is related to my new book, my new project, next stage of my creative journey. In my new book I would like to share my life experiences in a way that they would be acceptable to my religious, spiritual and secular friends. That is why in my dream I saw people from different faiths and traditions coming together.

My mom represented Muslim faith,

my guests represented Christian and Hindu faiths,

 and

my friend Hildy represented Jewish faith.

In my dream they were not only peacefully co-existing but also eating together.

          I was the host. I was feeding them what they had brought for me. It is as if in my new book I would feed my readers what I have learnt from different traditions…religious as well as secular, spiritual as well as scientific. I would like to find some common grounds and build bridges the way I built a bridge between my mom and guests who did not speak English. It would also be a bridge between the East and the West, my mother from the East and my guests from the West.

          Since the dream had my colleagues and friends from the time I used to work in a psychiatric hospital it reminded me of the time when I was working as a psychiatrist in a traditional hospital. Leaving the hospital and starting my clinic was like a death and a re-birth, end of one chapter and beginning of a new chapter of my life when I pursued my special interest in psychotherapy and developed the model of my Green Zone Philosophy and Therapy. Developing that model was my integration of different traditions I studied as a student of human psychology, literature and philosophy and became a humanist psychotherapist. It was the time when I realized that there are as many truths as human beings and as many realities as pairs of eyes.

          In the dream, Hildy, for me, represented the Jewish tradition, the oldest of monotheistic traditions. As a humanist I have been learning the wisdom of all traditions, the wisdom that has been passed on from one generation to the next in the form of folktales.

          In the dream all my colleagues and friends sitting around the table eating, talking and smiling, reminded me of one of my favourite Jewish folktales. In this folktale a Rabbi asks God,

“I talk about Hell and Heaven in my synagogue every week but I have never seen them. Can you show them to me?”

“Which one do you want to see first?” God asked.

“Hell” Rabbi answered.

“Go on the road to your left and you will see a door. Enter it and you will see Hell”.

The Rabbi did what he was told. When he entered the room he saw men and women, children and elderly from all cultural backgrounds sitting around the big bowl full of delicious food. But they all looked sad, unhappy and malnourished. They looked poor in the midst of plenty. When the Rabbi looked closely he saw that all of them held a six foot long spoon and after picking the food they could not feed themselves. The Rabbi got the message.

          To see Heaven Rabbi was asked to go to the right. When he entered the room he saw similar people from diverse cultural backgrounds but they all looked happy, healthy and peaceful. When he looked closely he saw that each person with six foot long spoon was feeding the person across him or her. Blacks were feeding the Whites, men were feeding the women, and elderly were feeding the children. The Rabbi found the secret of Heaven.

          Bette was quite amused by my free association. I shared with Bette that there was one difference between the Rabbi and myself. The Rabbi wanted God to show him Heaven while I would like to see Heaven on earth where all human beings reach a level of social consciousness to realize that we are all part of the same tribe and the same family, the human tribe and the human family and we need to develop a feeling of cooperation rather than confrontation to create a just and peaceful world. It is my dream and I hope that one day that dream comes true.

          I thought it was interesting that I had a dream while I was reading the writings of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, two masters of dream analysis. The more I read their works the more I realized that they had as many differences as similarities. Both focused on the psychology of dreams but Freud focused on human sexuality while Jung focused on human spirituality. Freud related dreams to the past while Jung also saw future in them. Freud was preoccupied with personal unconscious while Jung was obsessed with collective unconscious. I found their theories illuminating and enlightening. They made me aware of the wisdom of our dreams.

          It is interesting that Freud had started analyzing his dreams when he was forty after his dad passed away in 1896. He analyzed his dreams for three years and then wrote his masterpiece Interpretations of Dreams in 1899 that became the Bible of psychoanalysis. Freud believed that the death of one’s father was a significant event in one’s life. In my dream my dad Abdul Basit had passed away and people were coming to offer condolences. My dream reminded me of that morning in 1995 when I had received a phone call from my sister Amber sharing with me that my dad was taken to the hospital unconscious as he had a stroke. It was the holy month of Ramadan and he was fasting. After hearing the news I hoped that either he fully recovers or he passes away. The last thing I wished for him was to suffer and spend the last few years of his life in a wheelchair. In the afternoon when Amber called again sharing the sad news that my dad had passed away, I felt relieved.

          It is a strange coincidence that it was the same day when my dear friend Zahid had arranged a big party in his house to have the premiere of my first documentary titled Mixed Marriages. He had invited the Bengali director Fuad Chaudhry and all those couples who had participated in the documentary. I received them all and gave a nice speech thanking them and shared a few jokes. Everybody enjoyed the film and the dinner. After everybody left I shared with my close friends that my dad had passed away that morning.

          The next day I shared the news with my colleague Anne Henderson. She was surprised that I was calm, cool and collected. For the next few weeks she was waiting that I would break down and cry. When I did not she asked, “Why are you not grieving?”

I spontaneously said, “ When I left Pakistan, I had grieved them all as I had no plans of going back.” It was hard for me to share with her the feelings of an immigrant living thousands of miles away from the family who had accepted a foreign land as an adoptive motherland.

          I could not go to Pakistan just after my dad’s death. When I went after 40 days to attend the special ceremony of chaaleesvaan, I was pleased to meet many of his students and friends who had great admiration for him and called him a sufi, a saint.

          When I read Freud’s and Jung’s writings they believed that all mythological stories including that of Oedipus started with the death of the father and a special relationship with the mother.