Dream

Some people see life as a series of multiple-choice questions: which university should I choose, which job should I take, which girl should I marry. The answers they give to such questions bring them to certain constellations of events and things in their lives, with which they are more or less happy. Other people, though, dream their life as they wish it was, as if they had no constraints, no limitations, no reality to account for. Then they keep working on their dreams as if each dream was a puzzle, and do not stop until they finally gather all the pieces of the puzzle needed to make the dream reality.

Physics has seen remarkable progress in the last century, with rock-star-like popular scientist such as Albert Einstein and Steven Hawking. However, despite the progress, scientists are still looking for a unified theory that could explain all the forces in the universe. String theory is currently the only candidate; it explains particles and forces as excitations of elementary strings in extra, unseen dimensions of the universe. The theory claims that, just like a guitar string produces a sound of certain notes and intensities when stretched in certain manners, elementary strings in the universe residing in space-time dimensions we do not perceive produce the particles and forces around us. Perhaps we are just like a fish living in a two-dimensional swimming pool who experiences the water waves caused by a pebble from a third spatial dimension that falls in the water.

In many situations faced with unexplainable forces or unattainable dreams, extra dimensions – whether extra dimensions of the universe, life resources or possibilities – may reveal the solution to problems we face. For example, imagine an ant walking on a one-dimensional line, such as a rope, and being faced with an obstacle on her path. While she stays in her one-dimensional universe, she cannot find a way to overpass the obstacle. If, however, she expands her universe to a second dimension, the ant can overpass it and continue her journey. When faced with challenges in our lives, we have unique tools that enable us to create the extra dimensions we need to solve our problems: Dreams.

Dream of a world and a life that you really want, as if you had no constraints, just an infinite number of dimensions and possibilities in the universe of your life, with total disregard for any logic, reason and barriers. Forget the real world and create the dream world in your mind. Imagine your universe with any extra dimensions. Have the courage to dream big dreams. Have no fear of failure, it is just a dream. In dreams you can be anybody, do anything, have talking rabbits, jump though space and time, be a hero or save the world, change perspectives, racism, mentalities. Dream. Dream fairy tales, dream science fiction, but dream.

Just dreaming is not enough. Be faithful to your dream. Work on it. Do something every day to bring you closer to it. Think of your dream as a puzzle you want to create, and for which you need to put many pieces together just in the right order, to form the complete, breathtaking picture. Puzzle pieces could be anything, from a contact you’ve made, a new skill you’ve learned, a good relationship you’ve built, or a new technology you’ve discovered. Gather these puzzle pieces one by one like precious stones, and trust that one day you will put (some of) them to good use. That lucky day, the puzzle pieces will start to fit, and you will create a complete picture. You will look back and marvel at how what will be reality that day, seemed some time ago, by all rational accounts, impossible.

But until that sweet day, reality is different. Your life is not the dream, it is the bitter, cruel reality. And this reality is pushing you down, tearing you up, showing you each and every why-not, screaming to you, preaching to you, making sure you know and understand beyond a shadow of a doubt that your dream is not possible. Reality is heavy on you and on your soul.

Believe. Keep working on your dream. Identify and create the extra dimensions you need that will allow you to overpass your obstacles. Take them one by one. Have other people achieved your or similar dreams? Then it must be possible! It is only up to you to find the whirl hole for teleportation to those imaginary dimensions. If you are brave enough to let the dream unroll far enough, perhaps you'll dream a dream nobody has ever dreamed. You'll dream of flying like the Wright brothers before any men had ever flown an airplane or of sailing around the world in a ship like Magellan dreamed.

Don't let people tell you your dream is impossible. They don't know; they didn’t see it; they didn't dream it. If they tell you it is hard, ignore them. Instead, let the dream catch life, let it grow and develop. Let it catch more color and shape until you can see it even more clearly. Let the dream carry you surfing on faithful waves that bring you to it. If you do that, the dream will become alive and will be more powerful than you, so powerful that you will know for sure that is where you are headed, even though rationally others might have shown it to be impossible.

You’ll work hard, harder than you ever thought you could. You’ll keep working hard on your dream and you will believe in it with all your soul. You will dream it, you will see it real, you will feel it close. But despite all your efforts and faith, some days reality will kick in again. Those days you will know and feel that you are working in vain, on a dream that cannot come true. You will be realistic, lucid and depressed.

Your best hope? Escape reality. Dream as if everything is perfect. It is those days when you need to pull out the peace of paper with the dream from under your pillow and dream the hardest you ever did, as if reality did not exist, just to get you through. Despite all the doubts you have, pretend there is no doubt in your mind that there is no other possible course of events but a magic fairy dust that will somehow bring you to a future in which your dream is reality, and it is so common and normal that you could not have ever imagined a different outcome. In those dark moments, the dream will give you the strength to keep hoping and searching for puzzle pieces to collect. It will again give you power. Reality will become a bit easier to bear, and you will become stronger. Next day, start working on your dream again.

We live in soap bubbles that represent our comfort zones, but we have higher dreams and higher callings that can’t live in our bubbles. If we were to write our stories, we would do something more meaningful at work, we would not be confined by salaries, by other people’s thinking, by the limitations of our culture and upbringings. We’d push the boundaries to make anything happen, to live in a bigger, better soap bubble. But soap bubbles are fragile. As you blow to expand them, they might break, propelling you out of your comfort zone, and until you create a new one for you, you’d be left feeling homeless and alone, without the little comfort and protection you had. Have you gone too far? Have you flown to high like Icarus and your waxwings have melted? Have you broken your soap bubble? You have failed. Maybe you regret trying. It was risky and stupid.

Start again. Get up and start again. Dream. Create extra choices that have not been given to you. You are not limited to the multiple-choice answers you are being offered. Create your own. Work on your dream until you succeed. As long as you’re alive, there is still hope left. Be stubborn. Be faithful. Be courageous.

When my demons get a hold of me and swirl around my body and soul strangling me tighter and tighter until I cannot escape anymore, I take a deep breath, relax my gaze, and tell to myself: “Have some faith, Iulia. Just have some faith.”