Njattyela sreedharan was born in 1938 in Thalassery, a small town in Kerala, India. After fourth standard he had to drop out of his school. He then started working at a beedi (local cigarette) factory. After a few years he started learning the languages of the neighbouring states own his own. For learning Tamil, Kannada and Telugu he sought help from a lot of people from the respective states. His native language being Malayalam, he started compiling a dictionary connecting all four languages. That is, for each word in Malayalam we will get to see the corresponding Tamil, Kannada and Telugu words. Reading a lot of books, magazines and newspapers he would try to find the words in the other languages. If any of the word cannot be found in any books he will travel to the respective state to search for the words. It took him twenty five years to complete this unique dictionary. After all the hardships and financial troubles he finally completes the dictionary which is the only dictionary connecting all four languages. Eventually when he completes it, more hardships surface as he tries to get it published. When he approaches the Kerala Language Institute and Kerala Literature Akademi, they raise apprehensions since Sreedharan does not have a degree or formal education. But at the same time, among all the PhD degree holders who work at the institutes, they cannot find someone who can evaluate the work done by Sreedharan. After a while even the manuscript goes missing and Sreedharan has to file a legal notice to get it back.‘Dreaming of words’ brings out the story of Njattyela Sreedharan and his one of a kind dictionary. We get to know more about him from teachers who helped him learn the languages, former director of the Kerala Language Institute, the secretary of Kerala Literature akademi and Sreedharan’s lawyer. Sreedharan's work is inspired by Dr. Hermann Gundert, the German missionary and scholar from Stuttgart who compiled the first Malayalam dictionary. This connection between Njattyela Sreedharan from Thalassery and Dr. Hermann Gundert who worked in the city during the 1840s and 50s is mentioned in the documentary. (https://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Hermann_Gundert)