Dreamers

Dreams are funny, fickle things. To be clear, I'm not talking about the weird stories that rush through your head at night. I'm talking about the sort of dreams that keep you awake at night. They have the power to move you. To make you face what you never thought you could face, or endure something you would really rather not endure. They give us drive, meaning and purpose in our lives. In many ways our culture is built on a culture of dreaming. We (or at least- I) live in America, land of the free where you can grow up to do anything you want to do. We've grown up listening to fairy tales where some character is given a quest to complete, or a dream to fulfill. If you need any convincing of the pervasive nature of these dreams, just look at Disney's popular song, "I've Got a Dream," an entire song dedicated to the unfulfilled dreams of these ruffians. Of course, there is a reason why the need to have a dream is so strong in our culture. The most interesting people I meet typically have a dream of some sort. Whether it be something they want to do or something they want to become or someplace they want to travel, almost everyone that is going anywhere in life seems to have a dream.

That being said, dreams are terribly fickle. We use them as an anchor to define who we are, where we are going and why we are doing what we are doing, but dreams also tend to have a rather short life-span. Think back five years ago. Are your dreams the same? What about 10 years ago? I certainly don't have the same dreams I had when I was five and as much fun as those dreams were, I'm perfectly okay that most of them have shifted. Some are dropped for one reason or another, others are fulfilled and the dreamer is left with a blank slate.

So what do you do after all of that happens? What happens when you fulfill your dreams? They never really get to that part in the movie. I mean, sometimes they have the whole "and they all lived happily ever after," but that's really nothing more than a tidy clean-up phrase. What in the world does "after" include? Its kind of an interesting thing to think about. And for those of us who are dreamers, its something that we'll have to grapple with relatively frequently throughout our lives.