On Dreams
Contemplations
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Editor’s note: This essay is inspired by the sagacious advice of a guitar teacher whom I had the privilege of encountering in my youth, some 20 years ago. Entering his music studio was like visiting the home of a delightful elderly - he regales you with back stories of every instrument on display, encourages you to ask questions without expecting immediate answers, doles out honeyed wisdom without warning, and, on occasion, he sinks indulgently into soft swirls of nostalgia.
In one of these many conversations, I expressed how mastering the guitar had always been a childhood dream. Upon hearing the word ‘dream’, radiance slowly, ever so gradually, filled his visage, displacing any prior fatigue in his demeanour, like a magic potion. With a childish twinkle in his eyes he said “dreams are the capes we wear to fly”.
The rhapsody of those words have remained embedded in my soul ever since and today’s piece pays tribute to its universal resonance.
There are times when reality and its accompanying weight presses against us with such vehement intensity that our dreams become the only recourse for escape - to extricate ourselves from this otherwise stifling predicament and mangled mess. Just as when the ground beneath one’s ideals is suddenly shaken in virulent jolts, one looks to the heavens for a miraculous intervention.
However we need not look far for guidance.
Sitting deep within us is an interlocutor we’ve known intimately our whole life - our inner voice, the wellspring of our subjectivity, urging us, through the clouds of hopeless cynicism, to entertain the improbable. Because beneath the blanket of gloom and heaviness of despair, she senses something buoyant, perhaps the humble beginnings of an internal revolution.
She pleads amidst the disquieting reality - a gossamer of human dilemmas, questionable foibles, unrest, injustice and of ecological and moral collapse - that we must, just this once, relinquish the different names and labels we give to living life and live it with all its disorienting uncertainty.
She calmly assures us that between the interstices of history and the future, poetry and politics and self and the world, there exists a type of liberation. A freedom that impresses upon us to work for something because of its inherent goodness rather than its probability to yield success.
This is not an irrational expression of passive optimism but a motive force of rightful action. An inward calling, unsullied by external manipulation, to hope and dream. An opportunity to suspend the dryness of reasoning and exchange our fuzzy interpretations of reality for the courage to follow our heart and instinct.
Dreams encapsulate vestiges of every self we’ve inhabited since childhood, selves that we’ve never dared to explore in all its lucid glory. They are a medley of impressions and echoes of the life we want to authentically live and the love we crave to sincerely gift.
This is a time, my fellow dreamers, to come to terms with oneself; to put an end to our role as mere performers of existence. It is a time to free ourselves from our shadows - prejudices, guilts, doctrines - and bath in the vision we have of the life we are meant to lead.
Our dreams mediate between the ideal and the real by cultivating the right balance of critical thinking and hope, like a delightful divertimento. They lift our heart. They allow us to dance with our most unnameable desires and our deepest fears. They grant us the freedom to post grand questions to even more perplexing problems, navigating the labyrinthine path into the absurd in search for the absolute. Dreams are an indispensable ally to every thinking, feeling, civically conscious human being.
When we relentlessly chase the lingering trail of our dreams, we are, in actual fact, our most essential and sovereign selves — we build and unravel entire worlds, answering to nobody. In doing so, we adopt a telescopic view of life, one not merely based on short term impulses but on far vaster scales of space and time.
A single dream, however miniscule or grandiose, can lift us from the plane of our storied worldview onto a whole new vista, where in the spacious silence of the unimagined we imagine ourselves afresh.
Dreams are the poetry of our existence, the portal to power and possibility, energised by the universal cognisance that the life of the body and the life of the spirit are inextricably entwined.
So a call to dream, is also to imagine, to protect, to persevere, to sing, to dance, to fall yet to stand, to love, to forgive; in other words, to live.
Wear your cape and fly.
"Dreams are the poetry of our existence" 👈🏼 wow, _this_ is poetry!
The song of your words is amazing to me. I read this twice in a row, sensing the layers of depth only could be revealed with multiple readings.
"Dreams are the capes we wear to fly”-- the best!
When capes are hidden, the world dims. But with a cape colors unveil.
Thank you.