Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

�Teaching for Dreams.�

Yesterday I was in the library, just walking around the shelves and looking at the titles. I do that a lot. I like to pick a book that way, looking at its physical make-up, judging by its thickness if I can read it in fifteen days -the maximum amount of time our library system allows, or if I can find a book on a different, appealing subject other than those I usually read.

Out of the blue, my eyes caught a title that said, “Teaching for Dreams.”

“What an interesting title,” I thought and reached for the book. When I had it in my hands, I saw that somehow I had misread the title. It was a book on ballet and its title was “Reaching for Dreams.”

I put the book back in its place, since ballet dancing is not in my repertoire, but then, I thought maybe this was a subconscious mistake or no mistake at all.

What if we raised our children with dreaming? Or showed them the way to dreaming? Parents, teachers, and those in teaching positions usually teach reality and try to show it by example. If anything, when the child dreams, we correct and steer him/her to what we think is real and possible. Even those adults who may respect the child’s freedom of speech wear a condescending smile on their lips and act as if they are tolerating his childish prattle.

Maybe, in addition to toleration, we could suggest an imagining game or ask questions starting with “what if?”

Yet, children are not the only ones. What about adults who have forgotten how to dream? Those can be the people at whom life has thrown a curve ball or two or those who think they are so self-sufficient that they don’t need any dreams, which brings to mind the quote, “Only the geniuses and idiots are mentally self-sufficient.”

They are a sorry lot… those types who have forgotten to dream. Not only they aren’t self-sufficient as they assume themselves to be, but they also carry a handicap of depths. I am sure they can be shown the path to dreams, if only supplied with fresh hope. Maybe their day-to-day life has become entirely time-consuming for they have been walking –for empty concerns- on well-trodden paths, instead of exploring new avenues. One must be patient with those, since the challenge involves teaching an old dog new tricks.

That kind of a person, first, has to see that there is a still more important place for other kinds of contact with the world than the kind he’s used to. He has to see that man is not just a brainy porcupine with hardened spikes. He has to feel the delicacy in existence, its poetry, and its music, so his dreams can start to form. Once this starts happening, once he meets the magic, he’ll love his dreams so much that he won’t be able to imagine their absence.

What are dreams anyway?
When we are too tired to walk,
they are those that carry us
on their backs
and they enter into
every place,
even the stone chambers of the heart,
so, we can clutch on to them
as if life savers.
Dreams are the mirrors we look into
to witness
the beauty of it all,
if the wind catches our fancy
and ripples it
for savoring,
even if
for a short moment.