Dreams are Forever

Literature and Our Dreams

J. Y. Gao

I have recently noticed a saddening possibility in my life and others. The dreams we dreamed in primary school – dreams of fame and success — are dreams that are taken from us as we grow older. “Why is this so?” I must enquire. Why do the big dreams of little boys fade into contempt and disappointment? Why do dreams of long lasting legacies and admiring followers turn to hopes of stability? Why do the things that we wish for most, become memories amongst the mundane tasks that tower our everyday lives as we journey through our adolescence. 

Well, we can start with the conclusion that as adulthood inches closer everyday, its realities begin to imprint their stamp on us. We realise that within the perfect dreams of happiness lie the intricacies of rent and taxes, of food and health, of hygiene and organisation, of relationships with those you hate and those you love. On top of this, do others expect us to strive towards fame? The alluring golden light of fame and admiration seldom reaches the depths of daily stress. Except when it does. 

To dream without limits is the only real power you have. You may seem the fool, delusional and pathetic, holding onto hope like a white lamb onto its life in the grime of the abattoir. And fool you may be, but better to be a fool than a blind man lost in a maze. Reality is, in part, a product of your imagination. And if perfection exists somewhere in your mind, then it exists in this world. 

Ironically, the dreams we create should remain in front of us, tempting us to continually reach for them.  Consider this: should we protect our dreams? Or should we expose them to the blizzarding weather outside their warm incubator?. 

Literature has provided us with tools to shield our dreams. Consider this reflection on Van Gogh’s Starry Night:

“Because of Van Gogh, the starry night of the vaulted sky above has traversed lonely, distant spaces of desolation and impressed itself upon the solitary canvas of the human heart.” 

The author of the article finished like this: 

“In one way or another, the heart of every postmodern pilgrim travels in awe under the brilliant, swirling canopy of his starry, starry night.”

Or consider this:

“Too early yet for blue bells, their heads were still hidden beneath last-year’s leaves, but when they came, dwarfing the more humble violet, they choked the very bracken in the woods, and with their colour made a challenge to the sky.”

The language gives you a perfect setting, but you know the colours of the flowers won’t shine nearly as bright in reality. More likely, the flowers will be dusted with dirt and buzzing with wasps.

Consider: 

“The air is blue and keen and cold, / With snow the roads and fields are white; / But here the forest’s clothed with light / And in a shining sheath enrolled. / Each branch, each twig, each blade of grass, / Seems clad miraculously with glass:

Above the ice-bound streamlet bends / Each frozen fern with crystal ends.”

Consider:

“He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward… It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

An author only needs to provide a map that follows a well-worn track down rolling foothills of wild flowers for a reader to venture, slowly, around winding paths, towards an Elysium shining just past the horizon. 

Let’s dream and dream big – dream well and dream wide – in case paradise abides only within the mind.

I will leave with this:

“They left at sunset. The west, over the land, was a clear gush of light up from the departed sun. The east, over the Pacific, was a tall concave of rose-coloured clouds, a marvellous high apse. Now the bush had gone dark and spectral again, on the right hand. You might still imagine inhuman presences moving among the gum trees. And from time to time, on the left hand, they caught sight of the long green rollers of the Pacific, with the star-white foam, and behind that the dusk-green sea glimmered over with smoky rose, reflected from the eastern horizon where the bank of flesh-rose colour and pure smoke-blue lingered a long time, like magic, as if the sky’s rim were cooling down. It seemed to Somers characteristic of Australia, this far-off flesh-rose bank of colour on the sky’s horizon, so tender and unvisited, topped with the smoky, beautiful blueness. And then the thickness of the night’s stars overhead, and one star very brave in the last effulgence of sunset, westward over the continent. As soon as night came, all the raggle-taggle of amorphous white settlements disappeared, and the continent of the Kangaroo reassumed its strange, unvisited glamour.”