Why dream?

Hello and welcome back to my historically sporadic blog, unfortunately conducted too much like my life. If I had to predict my future self at the moment, I would say that I will likely only blog when life experience provokes me to ask an important why question to which I may not be sure of the ever elusive, always mysterious, somewhere substantive Answer, though I am doubtlessly bound to have some hypothesis that I - despite my best efforts - will likely bombastically proclaim as the definitive Solution to every related problem (and every problem is related).

1) So lately I have been dreaming about dreaming. This new topic has been mostly provoked by two events. The first was my brother's graduation from high school. As usual, the top 2 graduates gave speeches about the power of dreams and of making one's dreams reality. This reminded me of my own speech at my own h.s. graduation. At that time I spoke in genuine admiration for my classmates' dreams as having amazing potential for my classmates and our future in the real world, while simultaneously preaching my hypothesis that our fullest potential is had in knowing in loving God, the "fundamental Answer to all the whys."

The second occasion for thought was today when I watched Man of La Mancha (about Don Quixote) with my father. Without going to much into the details of the movie, I will say that it basically proposes the following: life-as-it-is (realism, in one sense) is a crime, whereas living in a dream-state of life-as-it-should-be (idealism, in one sense) is where the only true freedom is to be found, however deviant from what seem to be the facts.

2) I judge that the dream is very powerful and telling about the stuff that makes up our heart. When we cannot perceive satisfaction in the stuff that our senses send us, something in us cries out for more. Our heart desires goodness, and so we dream of a wonderful world or environment which matches our expectation. Even more so, our heart desires meaning, and so we dream of a world where we have an important niche, a role, an indentity. Those of us who think service relates to life's meaning dream of futures where we will be heroes of service. The less correspondence we see in reality to what we want deep in our hearts, the more we create dreams to compensate. We think, one day I will be happy; or in my dream I am king, or servant, or prophet, or... you pick it.

There is another important aspect of the dream, and that is its effect on us. Appealing to the idealism of the dream actually does inspire us. It makes us want to get up and find our destiny. This is so if others make the appeal in our presence (think Dead Poet's Society - "Only in our dreams can we truly be free, twas always thus, and always thus will be," Mr. Keating), but also if we create a dream ourselves. We sit down (when we are in a good mood) and think of how our life should be lived (the origin of ethics?) according to our desires for meaning, goodness, beauty, justice, etc; and what forms spurs us on to action. This is so because the dream is a projection of the perceived answer to our deepest desires. The dream is intimately tied to our desire. But after a few years we learn that what will really fulfill these desires is so impossible that it is beyond the reach of our imagination. Whatever we imagine and name as our happiness, as our fulfillment, is never enough. True realization is always beyond our wildest imagination. And so the tendency is to slowly start to despair. We are usually too futile to achieve our dreams, and even when we do achieve them, we end up dreaming of something else, betraying our dissatisfaction. Thus, we can never think hard enough to even imagine our perfection.

However, the realization of our ultimate incompetence (- and I know at this point there are several very smart people shaking their heads at me and saying that I have "learned helplessness syndrome" - by all means make your case, for I too often sin against freedom; but do finish reading first -) does not make our heart go away. Our heart itself is part of "reality," which is the most curious of situations we could have in the whole appearance/reality debate. And so we are left hanging. If what we perceive is all there is, we are doomed to despair. But if what we imagine is not real, hollow, or unsatisfactory, we are also doomed to despair. Catch-22?

3) Is there more than what we perceive?
Is the fulfillment of the dream-causing desires present in what is real?
Can we stop dreaming?
Why dream?

4) So I am sorry if I've set myself up too smoothly for my hypothesis; I need to work on being more circumspect, because I often miss things. Therefore please send in your comments! Anyway, so in answer to these questions:

I currently think that the answer to the first question is yes on two levels. For one, we are always growing in what we perceive as we mature through life. Anyone who has ever taken a science course will agree that there is more to our daily experience than is immediately apparent to a babe. Those who have taken organic chemistry will agree even more heartily. Therefore, it is reasonable to suggest that perhaps the answer to our desire actually is here "in reality," but our perception is just too limited to comprehend it. I think that we live smothered by Mystery, where there is so much meaning, so much goodness, so much beauty that we miss it for the smallness of our eyes and brain. Our heart remotely senses it, though, but only in a confused sort of way. And on the second level, yes there is more than even the limits of what is knowable by limited human empiricism and even magnificent reasoning. Hence, the afterlife and immortality. But even before these, I think this 'being left hanging' suggests a transcendent world that is really real. I think that this transcendent world, the home of Infinite Mystery, is also imminent. Hence we are smothered by even more Mystery. But lets not rule out life on another planet because our telescopes are too small.

If there exists an infinite, transcendent Answer that is imminent in what we experience as reality, than yes, to some degree, we can have fulfillment here. But the "reality" is not what ultimately satisfies us; only that which is "really real" and tied to our reality is what fully satisfies us. And in my experience, such satisfaction is extremely temporary here. Such short-livedness is to be expect from an Answer that isn't itself a shackled member of the space-time continuum. Rather, the space time continuum touches the Answer, springs from the Answer. Anyway now I'm getting too metaphysical. Hume would have my butt.

We can only stop dreaming if we become intimately one with what we desire, if we have a regular relationship with the Answer. Because of our individual forgetful hearts, I think that this is only possible in a context of a community that all recognize a common Answer (i.e. God). Someone might suggest despair as an end to dreaming; but I say that even the one who despairs dreams of fulfillment in accepting not being fulfilled (for this is indeed not a possible reality), or else (God forbid) dreams of the end in suicide.

Why dream, then? We dream because our hearts need something great. We should continue to dream because it excites us to positive action and helpful application of our freedom. But as we do so we should remember that such dreams are quite likely fairly distant from reality, and at times may be doing more harm than good (though they say God brings good from evil!). Some dreams might be downright impossible and lead to tragic ends (see Dead Poet's Society). Dreams, the outcome of our natural hope, can easily become tragic when divorced from truth. That is why we should have a nobler reason for dreaming and dealing with dreams. It would be to our advantage if we saw in our dreams our own hearts, so that we might recognize any Answer to those hearts that does not come from our own imagination, but from Something that we cannot deny is true. That is, we have to dream; and we should be conscious of these dreams so that when the Mystery that presently smothers us offers us its benevolent Answer, in a Form that we cannot deny, we will welcome It as the true Sibling to our desiring hearts.