Daydreaming. That’s what it’s all about. A simple
form of escapism. Imagining a world so much better than this one. Then some
flurry of excitement passes through life and all our petty hopes fall,
shattering into a million other wishes. As suddenly as it happened, it’s all
over, as though everything had always been the way it was now. Uncertain desire
pervade our tiny minds before reality leaks through the many gaps. But what is
it all for? Why should we have to dream? Can’t our present lives sustain some
feeble glow of joy? And is our fantasy world the real antidote for loneliness?
By why loneliness?
Most of us daydream when we’re lonely, when the
friends who’ve always been there have gone and everything we ever wanted just
falls apart like shattered glass. For some their only desire is youth. Those
too few years of non-understanding and that simple awareness that kept people
young. In grow older we lose our ability to imagine and are left to rely on the
memories of things that have passed. Youth hold the virtue of ignorance and the
longing for wisdom and knowledge. But knowing makes us old. So we turn to
castles in the air, where only we are king. And nothing else matters any more.
We become involved in our own little make believe lives where the cries from
the world can’t be hear and the aches inside cause not pain. It’s almost as
though a sense of relief passes over us, a great wave of freedom letting our
real selves burst into our minds; full of life, vivacity and energy. Compared to
that reality seems so dull and meaningless. We pass through life, hurt a few
people on the way – what’s the point. Imagination gives us sanity, warms us in
a glowing desire for living. How easy it is to be mesmerised by all that could
have been. But dreams can’t change the world, though they may alter our
confused surroundings. Of course you could argue that that dreams have made us
what we are. Where would we be now without imagination? Today, after all is the
imagination of yesterday, and tomorrow of today.
In some dark corner of every mortal mind is a small
and perfect world moulded to suit us. It is the most personal thing we have and
it is at its peak in youth. So are the dreams of the elderly as wild as those
of children? Or do they merely think? Remember? About what I couldn’t say. But
they don’t dream. There’s nothing left to want, except time. The old have
little else to do, shut out from a changing world where we are the ones who
change. Yet somewhere deep inside we expect life to be the same and are unable
to adjust to our different surroundings, although we slot into dreams as though
we were always meant to be there.
Time and events are irrelevant. If our feeble
imaginings are so much better than life with all its scorn and hatred then
education should involved being taught to drift to contemplative moods, see
clear paths through the maze and seek the meaning of the flame. Dreams give us
a mature outlook on life, grant us some form of knowledge and comprehension of
the world. They help us to learn, despite being children of an idle brain.
Dreams enable us to know more about ourselves but so few people ever dream.
Others don’t stop at castles but build cities and walk through their streets at
various intervals in the day.
Of course, constantly living under pretence can be
a bad thing. Your mind can be so certain of something entirely fictitious. On
the other hand, it can keep you going when things go wrong. The ability to
imagine is a gift. While in one situation we can take ourselves to a new and totally
different one. Dreaming is more than futile hopes. They hold more promise. Of
what, depends on the topic of your dreams. And it’s dreams that make us
different from each other, our own separate goals that divide us. The law can
take away our rights as people but no one can take our right to dream. It is
something we will always have, through every generation that sweeps across the
earth. Seductive fantasies tempt every idle mind and are so often succumbed to.
Dreaming, in a way, is a skill. It becomes an art to be able to dream and
completely change in to a purely imaginary person, with no real shape or form.
Just an existence with human thoughts and feelings. Yet the world around us
goes on, we are still the same being with the same problems, hopes and wishes
as we were before. And we can be changed from this just by our imagination.
The creations of our minds are even more
complicated than reality. The freedom of thought complicates our live
considerably if misused. Like everything, it has its dangers. We can fill our
mind with any propaganda in the world and be converted in utterly different
people whether or not we wish it. So castles in the sky do have dungeons and
evil tremors in the air. They aren’t all pink with turrets and flags, nestled
on candy floss clouds, bathed in warm sun. They can be black, dominating, with
streaks of lightening silhouetting them against a darker sky. But it takes
imagination to realise this.
It is through dreams that we reach reason, with
thoughts that we progress and with imagination that we create the world and
lifestyle of today. Dreams are essential to everyday living however far from
reality they may be. Although they are all impossible until proven possible,
they are all still there, somewhere, within millions of unknown minds. They
live, grow and die with us. Is it fair, is it right to try and stop these
dreams from entering the minds of men, for it is they that pull us forward. And
as the nursery rhyme goes ‘life is but a dream’. How true. How very true.
