Someone once said, “Nothing happens unless you first dream”; perhaps not in those exact words, but words to that effect.
And it is true. What can you accomplish if you go through life living each day as it comes, without a plan for the future? Nothing! And how do we plan for the future if we have no dreams? We will leave you to figure that one out with the caveat that if you do not have your own dreams you are at risk of being induced or trapped into living someone else’s.
So why do we dream? We are not experts at this but we do enough dreaming to know that the dreams we have at night while asleep, are sometimes as a result of the constant working of our subconscious minds. The remains of the day; the work we were unable to finish; the conversations we ought to have had; manifest themselves in our dreams at night.
Then there are also those dreams that fulfil unspoken and never-to-be-spoken wishes; desires we know lack practicality; things we would never ‘dream’ of doing, we do in our dreams.
The dreams which we find to be most important, however, are those we have while still wide awake. Not the ones that emanate from the endless ramblings of lazy minds, but those which have been budding in our subconscious from the time we were born.
The dreams that direct who, what and where we will be and when; the dreams that in time, we turn into plans, hopes for the future; the ones we work towards achieving.
We believe all dreaming is good – counting out the nightmares, of course – but the dreams we choose to follow, that direct our lives’ paths are perhaps the best.
Why then, we wonder, do people scoff at dreamers? We suppose that when dreams are too grandiose they carry the hint of impossibility. But just imagine for one instant several people, hundreds, no thousands, having the same dream. Is it not possible then that with everyone pulling in the same direction, that which seemed to be too heavy a load might just become a feather?
This is exactly what the legendary John Lennon sang about in his song
“Imagine”:
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one…
Just imagine that.
(thescene@stabroeknews.com)
