Soy Tu Sueno

"I had a dream about you."

Conversations that start this way never seem to go well.  Not for me, anyhow.

In your dreams...

Sweet dreams, my love...

Dreams can be wonderful things.  They can be encouraging things.  Powerful things.  Troubling things.

I have been troubled lately.

It is a teacher's job to encourage his students to follow their dreams.  Yet, how can he do so, if he himself fails to follow his own dreams?

It is not the failure to follow dreams that is so troubling.  It is the lack of clairvoyant dreams that keeps me from restful slumber.

Those who have dreamed dreams have been both revered and ridiculed throughout history.  Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz's dream of a snake swallowing his own tail led him to the discovery of the structure of benzene.  Paul McCartney awoke from a dream with a melody still in his mind, and quickly stepped to the piano and worked out the tune to "Yesterday".  Days before his assassination, Abraham Lincoln dreamed he was at his own funeral in the White House.  It was the famous words, "I have a dream..." that stirred an entire nation to move toward a more civil and equal society.

And yet, people act in despicable ways in the pursuit of their personal dreams.  So too, do people act when they have no dreams.

If you asked me twenty years ago what my dreams were, I could rattle off a fairly specific list of things I wanted to acquire, accomplish, or complete.  But now, I don't know.

I want to dream.  I want to feel that wonderful compulsion and drive toward some dignifying or enlightening end.  To have a dream and to work toward it is the greatest experience one can have in this life.

I awoke from a vivid dream this afternoon.  I was imprisoned.  I escaped.  I was pursued.

Better to be in prison, than to be constantly on the run, never having peace of mind, ever wondering what lies around the corner.  In this dream I was a convicted criminal, and I was pursued for all my terrible deeds.  My terrible dreams?  Dreams and deeds are virtually inseparable...so without dreams, you don't have many deeds.  (And vice versa?)

I wonder, have I taken my dreams into custody?  Imprisoned them?  Deprived them of the thrill of freedom, of the thrill of being pursued?  Are they slowly starving?  Or are they kept alive with hope, like Edmond Dantes, who spent all those years dreaming of revenge, plotting his escape and planning his revenge?

I'm so glad I'm not in high school, and I haven't been given the assignment to write about my dreams for the future.  I would have writer's block.  Or would I?  A writer who doesn't write is just a dreamer...isn't he?

So many questions...

And that is my week in a Nutshell,
Hop