In praise of dreaming

There are times when human beings must decide between following the prompting of their hearts and continued survival,   between doing what feels right, and doing what seems prudent, if they want to see another day.   When the world around us makes doing what feels right mortally dangerous, we either choose whatever right feeling thing is ‘the hill we want to die on’, or we join the resistance and become passionate dreamers.  Even if we try to conform, I believe there will always be a part of us that, out of awareness, secretly rebels.  Outwardly, we accommodate ourselves to the world as it currently exists, while inwardly finding subtle ways of staying true to our hearts’ true yearnings, ways that, for the most part, go undetected by the thought police.   We bide our time.  We wait, fortified by dreams, conscious or unconscious, of better times ahead.    

Afghanistan, Brunei, Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, United Arab Emirates, Uganda, and Yemen.  In these countries, those who openly engage in same sex relationships risk the death penalty.   In such circumstances, not all but many choose to ‘stay in the closet’.   That does not necessarily mean not engaging in same sex relationships at all but engaging in them with varying degrees of furtiveness; it may also mean engaging in them with varying degrees of awareness. In other words, in a culture in which sexual activity with someone of the same sex means mortal danger, human beings learn to repress and deny those desires, to push them out of awareness and declare themselves ‘straight’ or ‘normal’.   They get married, they have children, they conform and wonder why doing what they are told feels so bad.   But I do not believe this means those desires are ever fully extinguished, or either, in a sense, that they ever cease to be acted upon.   I believe these desires appear irrepressibly in accidental, stolen glances, in hidden, secret fires and in our dreams.   For those caught in the normality-trap, such dreams may be an unconscious source of pleasure until they catch themselves at it, waking from their dreams and nervously looking around, wondering what words they may have spoken in their sleep, what may have slipped out.    For those whose conformity is a conscious survival strategy, dreaming is also conscious.   These conscious dreamers form underground countercultures, create secret codes or use forms of artistic expression subtly to express their hearts’ true yearnings. 

The powerless and the oppressed have always been dreamers. Zora Neale Hurston, the black female novelist and anthropologist, wrote about how the context of slavery produced an incredibly rich counterculture of artists who dreamed of liberation.   Karl Marx described religion, in particular Christianity and its dream of an eternal afterlife, as the ‘opium of the masses’, only to substitute the Christian dream with the revolutionary dream of communist utopia.   

Perhaps dreams of progress, the dreams we dream when we choose continued survival over facing some existential threat, belong particularly to dualistic cultures which are organised around a belief in the separateness of the mortal body and the eternal soul.   Can we talk of beginnings?  It is tempting to say that the first choice of this kind was the choice to make a shelter rather than face another storm without protection, a choice that created a world divided into inside and outside.  Cowering in the dark, feeling the wind and rain shake the flimsy walls of our temporary home, we prayed for sunny days.   Perhaps, as we cowered inside the flimsy walls of our own mortal bodies, this creation of inside and outside set the scene for us to begin to dream of an immortal life beyond bodies that our life felt trapped inside.  Or was the first human choice of this kind the choice – did we choose? - to speak instead of simply to do?   Was it the fall into language that put an end to our immediate communion with the world and turned us into verbal animals, locked in the prison house of language,  dreaming of lost freedom?  

I have always been a dreamer.   As a child, I would dream of saving people from some catastrophe, of being a hero.  I would dream of being a writer.   I would dream of loving and being loved.  But at a certain point I learned to look down on my dreaming as childish weakness, as a mistake.   When my body’s mind in its wisdom wandered off into daydreams to escape the rigidity of a cultural landscape into which it did not fit, I called my mind disorganised and inefficient.    I feared that I would never figure out how to exist in the so-called ‘real world’ of wage slavery, of a productivity measured by the clock.   Like my mother that time when she stood at the top of the stairs, jaw clenched, lost for words, growling with frustration because I had again failed to tidy my room, I would look at myself and ask, ‘Where did I go wrong with you?’  In those days, although I dreamed, like the gay man in Uganda who is so terrified of punishment that he denies his sexuality even to himself, I did not realise that my dreams of creating, of helping and connecting fully with other humans, were pointing me in the direction in which my whole being longed to go.    What was I scared of?  Of course, it was the age-old fear: ‘No one will love me for who I really am’.   These days, more and more, I am learning to dare to live my dream, learning to take a leap into the dark and to trust that the darkness will not let me fall.  We dream because we have not yet reached the future of our imagination in which we and every other human is free to become the unique person they deserve to be, we dream because sometimes dreaming is all we can do to build the better world that is always yet to come.