There are people with severe disabilities who have a desire to enjoy an experience far beyond what their physical condition would allow them. Reach for a Dream is an organisation which assists in their flying in tandem with a paraglider, swimming with dolphins, visiting Disneyworld or making another such dream come true.
We grow up hearing that dreams are good. “Dream Big!” “What’s your dream in life?” are words spoken from stages, podiums and graduation ceremonies. Seldom does an audience register the disconnect between these proffered dreams and actual ones.
Last night… . I am in a swimming-pool. A boy has his head stuck into the weir where leaves collect. He is below the water, legs nice and straight out behind him, not moving. I register he is dead and think how difficult and expensive it will be to extract him. Can’t decapitate, will have to drop the water level and break away the concrete housing to extricate him. Then I am on a tee box, about to drive a golf ball when I see that I have no shoes. I ask my wife who’s driving past if she is available to fetch shoes from the house, which seems unnecessary as the next moment I am in a flat, unknown to me, shoes in hand, attempting to climb out of its second storey window and get to the ground below. When the dreams end there are some women involved.
Never have I heard a person recounting a dream he or she has had either wish that it become reality, tell me that it is an aim to be realised or that it has crystallised an ambition. Nor has there been more than a semblance of order: most have been inchoate, bizarre, amusing, amazing and terrifying. Meaning is there to be found: there have been dream situations where my underbelly has been exposed and from which I awake, grossly relieved that this “was only a dream”. However, launch pads for potentially great realities they are not.
But what if we did not dream? Eyes close, mouths might open and nasal obstructions amplify and the mind registers…nothing: the machine for brain activity shows a flat line. And that would be normal: everyone’s sleep the same, a blank until, some hours later, you awaken and the brain goes on again. That’s more disturbing than a nightmare. It would signify being in the control of a force, a Master Switch that turns us on and off depending on our state of being. Being an automaton under an unknown regime, humans lose any claim of freedom.
“Tiger, tiger…” a poem by William Blake, ends:
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Blake wonders at a God who dares create a world in which dwell creatures of absolute gentleness and ferocity, the Lamb and the Tiger, without its natural order running to destruction. I now wonder that God creates us to enter worlds without gravity, morality, accountability and order, where identities are assumed and there exist things which are not of this world. Our dreams are incomprehensible, beyond omniscience, which rules out any God which claims to be omniscient. They open our minds to the unimaginable: dreams awaken us.
I do not need to reach for a dream, not because I have the good fortune not to bear a disability, but because I have them near at hand, at the end of a day perhaps. Nor would I normally want them to come true as that might make this world an even more complex spot to reside in. And so I dream on, knowing God’s taking a smoke break from reality.
Thanks to Jon Tyson of Unsplash for the image
You make clear, Roger, the distinction between “dreams” as aspirations, as ambitions, and the mundane, but still extraordinary, process when, during our sleep, the unconscious mind slips its leash and runs wild. As to the former, I aspired while still at school to doing this and that once I was grown up: I have achieved some of those “dreams.” (But many have never been, and now never will be, achieved). As to the unconscious mind clearing itself of cookies (to which I sometimes compare the process of dreaming), there have been some horrifying nightmares, but there have also been some dreams which were beautiful and moving, and which caused me to waken with my eyes moist.
A few years ago I had one such dream, never since forgotten: all my family were alive – my mother, father, and we three boys – and we were standing together, holding hands, staring towards the Newlands Face of Table Mountain – a view I took in so often as a boy. But in my waking life, both my mother and my father were of course dead, and I had not visited Cape Town for many years, and my brothers (one of whom I had not even spoken to for a decade and a half) lived far away. Such longing that dream induced! Such an anguished sense of loss!
I woke from that dream with eyes already moist, and today, I am able to revisit Cape Town, and the Mountain, only in the novels I am currently working on.