“I’ll let you be in my dream if I can bee in yours” Bob Dylan said that…but he was quoting Abraham Lincoln.
To catch dreams is pretty easy, all you need is a few feathers from wild birds, and you’ve got the makings of night after night of sweet and scary dreams. But there is a different kind of dream which is illusive and which people the world over are letting slip through the net. The dream I talk of is the one that is not really a night time thing, but the dream that you live from day to day. This is an important part of the human spirit, it is spirit, it is something that goes to the core of the soul of every person, and yet most of us allow this type of dream to slip their consciousness, slip right through, like a stone in the sea.
What happened, why did you let your dream go, why did you abandon what you thought of and aspired to? Why did you let go of the fantasy which your life was based on? The reason was that it wasn’t even a fantasy in the first place, the hope that was there was crushed because of the realisation of limitations. The truth is that when your dreams are out of bounds, when they are beyond the potential of what is possible, the dream itself is not really in line with your own inner reality, somehow it got placed there through the pervasive media barrage full of ready-made artificial, high in sugar, high in colour, but in the end sickening and over stimulating ideal.
So the ideal, the one that you grabbed from somewhere is brought down to earth. It is unfulfilled. And as time rolls on, you have to be pragmatic and adapt to the surrounding circumstances. Following dreams now seems as relevant to your life as global warming is to the weather in the UK; it rains and is cold every day no matter. The thoughts that lifted and once gave life its magic are not really there anymore, it just becomes day in, day out, time goes quickly, but at the same time nothing changes, because routine has become the world. in fact thinking of something different, or seeing something new only serves to disturb that comfortable monotony of life.
But life needs a dream. TV can provide daily doses of that “escape”, of discovering new sensations and new worlds, but it’s not really substitute to watch someone else do it, where the plot is predictable, where the words are scripted, where to have the unexpected would completely upset the balance of comfort on the sofa. What can you dream of, what is there that is worth dreaming? What illusion, what beautiful visions, can a person bring into their lives? What is there that makes life special and not meaningless?
When one dark planet crosses over another dark planet in the outer solar system, dreams can be broken. It is more than just a dream that is broken in some cases, it is a person’s idea of what life is about. When this happens, life can stop, it can turn around. It takes a shock, it takes a fright, a nightmare, a living hell sometimes for the human mind to recondition itself into a new course, and it does this remorselessly, without thought, without mercy. What the illusion of childhood was, is no longer, and if you don’t have an illusion of your own to fill in that gap, there will be a terrible gap, until you die, which you might try filling with substitutes, such as beer, or any other distraction you can think of.
The fact that your mind held illusions, beautiful visions and ideals throughout childhood, through your youth, through your young life, means that they are capable of holding these visions again. Just because you lose Faith, lose hope, lose wanting to “be” something or feel a certain way, due to the materialisation of physical need does not mean that you must hand over your life on a piece of paper and let other people decide what your fate will be in resignation. No, this is wrong.
The human mind is like a mould, and it is designed to hold, an idea, an ideal, it is formed through desire to chart the uncharted, to achieve and to learn, to experience newness, even if that newness was simply the same thing over and over again, like a boy on a bike, riding around the same street over and over again, only to notice new things on each little journey he made. The novelty was there, it was always there, it was born out of childhood boredom rolling out the infinity that childhood thinks of as time.
So how do you go about changing your dream? How do you make a new one? As an adult, it is not satisfying to ride about in the same street, or even in the same town. People leave. They leave their home town because their dream breaks and they go outwards looking for the novelty, the stimulation of a new one, but unfortunately this too often breaks and rather quickly too. The answer is a difficult one.
The regeneration of dreams must satisfy the mind for its qualities of newness. It must however not be something that is easily broken. As water is poured onto water it quickly dissipates. There must be something concrete in the dream, there must be ambition instilled into it.
It is even possible to simply metamorphose the old dream. What you once wanted through innocent eyes, what you yearned for through a state of total irresponsibility was an ideal. This is where it gets interesting. The ideal can still be the same, it must in some sense satisfy what the original desire was, whether it was expansion, or comfort, or love, whether it was an aesthetic dream or one involving words, involving conversations and talk, the template may remain the same.
If you look at it in this way, the apparent death of the dream is simply an alarm bell ringing telling you to do something about it. The stronger and more painfully that bell rings, the greater the determination and structure that you might put into driving the dream forward. Dreams never really die. The truth is that you cut the edges off them to make them streamlined, to make them fit through the obstacle course of life. If the dream is too big, you don’t make progress, but without a dream there is no motivation. The secret of life is to refine the desire, refine and reform it until the life that you want to lead, becomes something that is inevitable. When disappointment occurs in life, when depression roles in from the failure of your dreams, from the failure of what you thought life ought to be, that’s when you need to clip the dreams wings, when you need to question whether it was in fact a dream which was worth while in the first place.
The more subtle you are in “adapting” and changing the original impulse of life, of transforming life into something fine, that makes you feel good, the easier it is to fulfil the dream. When things stir out in the darkness, and your life becomes plagued, you must ask yourself: “what did I want?” And “was what I wanted worth anything?”
The dream of life is there for us all. It is there to make in the shape in which we choose. Like the Biblical God being the image of man, man has the potential to shape his world. What he creates is his creation, and as we create our own lives we must think about what is worth creating in the first place. Some dreams are worth having, the ones which are lifetime dreams, the ones in which you say “I have brought about this reality through my desire, through having trust and faith in my vision, in my dream, and determination to make my dream real, in the image of what I wanted it to be.”
Once you Believe, it is easy to convince others to believe also. Especially if they have nothing planned.
Night Sky 
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