Wise Words? Dreams and Reality

I'll come out and admit that I'm a dreamer

Ive always spent too much time in my head, imagining the possibilities of life and wishing to be living in a different way than I am currently. Even though that adjective alone puts me in the same bucket as Kermit the Frog, in some ways being a dreamer can be a painful experience. Dreaming for some idea or situation to come into reality would certainly fit the Buddhist definition of a craving, specifically for something to be different than it is, and as I touched upon last time this can in fact be a cause of suffering and judgement (often self judgement in this case).

There's a lot of ideas I have which do not get written or even drafted (which sort of makes it even weirder that any of this stuff does get written or even looked over a second time before releasing) and one which is sitting in my blog right now is called "Mr Wanted to Be." It was sort of an idea for a short story and its mere presence shows the danger of dreams. They may not come true. A lot of American kids spend some time in their youth wanting to be a star in movies music or athletics, but few achieve those dreams and some walk away from the passion they once had in disgust at their own ineptitude. I know I have, several times.

When we realize our dreams are not going to come true, its a painful and gut wrenching experience. Dreams are fueled by passion and love, two of the sweetest and most lovely human emotions, so when not even these things can help bring us to the life we want to live it feels like they have been lost, wasted, destroyed in some way. Often the shattering of dreams can turn people very cold dark and bitter.

We can see this turn towards the dark and bitter all too clearly in the crushing of dreams that is a breakup. Often when we're in a relationship, good bad or toxic, we do a lot of dreaming in the context of that relationship. Personally, I imagined taking trips together, going to shows as a couple, hanging out with other people who respected us as a twosome. It didnt help that most of my relationship took place during COVID so sitting around and daydreaming was at an all time high. For a lot of reasons I had a lot of things I thought I was looking forward to in this relationship. And then, one day I felt I had to leave. I had to say goodbye not only to this person who in spite of her difficulty making good decisions really made me feel special and wanted and loved in a way I was desperately searching for before meeting her (which makes me sound like a user but maybe thats not too far off), but I had to say goodbye to our "together" dreams as well.

However, I dont want to close the book there on the topic of dreams. Because some dreams, though really far out of reach, are beautiful and inspiring years and decades after being expressed. The easy example is Dr. King's I Have a Dream Speech, which will surely be remembered as one of the most significant events in all of human history. It felt, at least from where I was sitting in suburban history class, that this was the moment when one person stood up and said with words which could not be misinterpreted that people were people and that we all deserve to be judged on the content of our character and not how we appear to others. It was a ridiculously far off dream then and it still is now, but its undeniable when looking back at modern American history that a lot of serious and impactful work has been done to build respect among different kinds of people, though crooked cops and institutional racism are still doing everything they can to make it hard and wrong to be anything other than straight and white. Dr. Kings Dream, though it was just a dream at one time, really did have a noticeable impact not just on his own way of thinking but on human consciousness as a whole.

Now thats a really grand scale, but I think that despite their often unattainable nature, dreams are still a wonderful thing and should be protected and cherished instead of feared and cast aside. That casting aside is a tempting option though, especially when you consider the kind of emotions we were talking about just a short while ago. Even with all of that baggage in mind though, I think avoiding dreams for their pain is a classic case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Think of why some choose to avoid dreams or dissuade others from perusing them. It is only because the thing which can be lost in so precious that we fear so much. But just like relationships, just because something has such a big presence that its absence would be painful does not mean that the thing should be feared. Quite on the contrary, the very idea that you are afraid of losing a thing shows that you have something to lose. And maybe this is just me, but I think having literally nothing to lose is a pretty awful place to be as a human being

In response to some of these extremely negative feelings, Ive had to start a really difficult but also meaningful and instructive process. I am now in the process of trying to bring my dreams into reality. 

Reality is a super scary thing, likely because we have so much less control over it than we would like. Yes sometimes things happen, particularly in our less controlled and altered consciousness style night dreams, which we would rather have never seen or experienced, but in general what happens in there is predictable at least in its singular source: your own consciousness and its many whims and worries.

However, reality can be a lot more challenging for several reasons. For one thing, everything in it has a finite end point. I often think of tragedy as an encounter with this aspect of reality, and in many ways with reality itself. Tragedy often comes out of nowhere, and sometimes it is the people who we considered stable and important presences in our lives who end up leaving them so crushingly early.  I lost a cherished friend at a very early age because someone else made poor decisions involving alcohol and driving, and without thinking or knowing it at the time that someone else ripped a precious and wonderful life from a world which was glad to have him. I had a lot of dreams tied up in that friend, I really thought we would watch each other get married and continue to share our love of video games and music for our entire lives. Now I live on with a persistent feeling that Im not doing as much with my life as he could

Quite simply, reality has a lot of stipulations, and thats the other and primary factor which makes it such a treacherous, hazardous environment for our dreams. Not only do all human lives have finite ends, but all resources do too. Yes, even the material things in the world around us are constantly decaying. The constant crawl forward of time takes its toll on all things. We live on a planet with a sizable amount of gravity and a giant heat and light source over our head and these things are all necessary for the very existence of life on this planet on a daily basis but they also place the matter on this planet into a state of constant decay. The Universe itself, despite being infinitely large, is also constantly decaying which makes all the love and passion we attach to dreams painful whether they are achieved or not. 

No matter who you are or what your dream is, even if its just to make it to the end of the day and pay your bills or fix your roof, it's attainability is bound to be tied to an endless amount of these people and things which are both precious and also constantly decaying. We need resources in order to manifest our dreams under the confines of reality, we need other people to believe in us and give us the support to continue working at our craft, and we need to attempt all our dreams under the confines of our own constant decay and mortality. Such reliance on others imposes a lot of stipulations on how you achieve your dreams. Our independent nature has a way of guaranteeing that one way or the other, those who step on others in order to achieve their dreams all pay for it one way or the other someway. So if you are interested in being able to continue living your dreams for the duration of your life, you can't just chase your dreams but you need to chase them with honesty and integrity or risk losing everything you worked so hard for.

So why try to bring dreams into reality at all? Well, I think the best reason is simply to share them. Reality is scary and terrible in a lot of ways but its also a shared experience with at this point in time around seven billion other individual human beings with their own things that they love passionately and deeply. Dr. King could have had his dream based on the injustices committed in his time alone, but turning that dream into a speech is what allowed it to impact the lives of millions. So I think in the end, even though persuing dreams can be painful and reality often does not seem like it wants our dreams, I think we're better off as people having chased our dreams, whether or not they turn out the way we imagined or not.

Keep dreaming

Sam