To dream of a better world is the very foundation of being human.
We, not the royal we, but the popular we. That which is meant by:” we the people” — that we!
We, humans, on this planet, in this civilization, at this time.
We then, have seen the year 2020 AD unravel before us. A year that has unstitched the very thin multicolored threads of our everyday reality, a year that forced us to look at our fissured civilization and appreciate how precarious our existence.
We have felt the hammer of immediacy, represented by a tiny, crowned virus, shatter the illusion of ‘all is well’.
And we are shaken, and in a sense outraged but also hopelessly aware of our indefensible way of life.
We have realized that we are very little in charge, if at all, of that which disturbs the flow of immediacy not to mention its consequences.
We are exhausted. We are wearied. We are spent.
We, however, have multiple stories at our disposal, some of which indicate that we are not in fact neither exhausted nor spent.
And so, though drained and beat we rise again.
For we can dream.
“There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.”
Douglas H. Everett
Dreaming then
Thomas Jefferson is known to have said that he preferred the dreams of the future than the history of the past and I concur. Personally, I am much more inclined to dream of the future than remembering the past. There are many reasons for that, chief amongst which is my firm belief that to take in one’s hands the creation of one’s own destiny is the ultimate prerogative of a freethinker. In a sense it may be called the duty of the individual in her quest for self-realization. For that one needs the dream of the future, both personal, collective and global.
There are many kinds of dreaming. Here I am not concerned with that which human (and other creatures) minds perform during sleep. Here I am interested in the sense of dreaming we perform while awake. The sense and meaning of which correlates to projections in time. It is the actual envisioning of one’s life and its derivatives and consequences. The ‘projective performance’ of our minds.
Dreaming can be considered one of the most potent tools at the disposal of our minds.
The tool of mind called dreaming is potent and effective for three main reasons.
First it allows us to bypass immediacy and ‘See’ as it were a different (and larger) reality than the one in front of us.
Second it allows us to ‘create’ time out of nowhere, to ‘carve’ a ‘vision time’ space where it is possible to build an alternative.
The third and most crucial: it allows an escape hatch combining vision, courage and perseverance.
The point with dreaming is that as a tool of mind it is the foundation that allows us to move forward and instead of dwelling in long past memories, imagining a future for ourselves that is different and superior but more crucially, it is ours.
It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Not an easy task to bring back the high spirits, but then again, depression is… well, kind of depressing. After many months of not publishing anything I may have reached a new opening.
Here’s to new beginnings.
End note:
Let it be remembered that there are many kinds of dreaming. A dreaming process is not a monolithic system. Daydreams, Lucid dreams and Night dreams among other kinds of dreaming are all part of what our mind does, all are part of our process of becoming. My interest however is focused in dreaming as a ‘projective performance’ of a conscious aware mind into the future.
Moreover, ‘projective performance’ or envisioning is a type of dreaming that enhances one’s life, increases one’s conscious aware activity and importantly, allows one to create a plan of becoming, as it were.
I leave you with what is to my eyes one of the best pieces of inspired thought about the future ever written:
“To romance of the future may seem to be indulgence in ungoverned speculation for the sake of the marvelous. Yet controlled imagination in this sphere can be a very valuable exercise for minds bewildered about the present and its potentialities. Today we should welcome, and even study, every serious attempt to envisage the future of our race; not merely in order to grasp the very diverse and often tragic possibilities that confront us, but also that we may familiarize ourselves with the certainty that many of our most cherished ideals would seem puerile to more developed minds. To romance of the far future, then, is to attempt to see the human race in its cosmic setting, and to mold our hearts to entertain new values.”
Preface to LAST AND FIRST MEN -A STORY OF THE NEAR AND FAR FUTURE — by W. Olaf Stapledon (July 1930)
Thank you for reading
