Words to a Friend with Dreams

Dear Friend,

Another word for dreaming can also be Hope and so I ask you to not stop dreaming.  We often speak about the "real world," and that dreams are imaginary worlds made of wind that blow away, but your experience is proving the opposite.  The "real world" falls apart, breaks and, like love letters that weren't good enough, it is crumpled up and tossed in the waste bin.  What is emerging is the Dream and the Hope and the Love, which were always just behind the passing Present, which is meant to be unwrapped.  This is why it is called the present and why St. Paul wrote,

 "So we do not lose heart.  Though our outer man is wasting away, our inner man is being renewed every day.  For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen pass away, but the things that are unseen are eternal" (2 Corinthians 4:16-18). 

Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians is one that has spoken to me a lot over the years, because it challenges me.  When I think that the world of thought, love, belief and hope is ethereal and ephemeral and that the boring everyday "reality" is thick and substantial, he tells me to flip it.  Imagine that your "dreams" are more the substantial things that don't go away and imagine that which we call "real" to be what is really passing away.

Continue dreaming, even though (or because) hope is thin.  And remind yourself that it is the nature of dreams not to stay dreams.  They're meant to come true. And, know that you are, in some sense, living the dream come true.  


Whoever you were when you were younger, even if it was just an hour ago, had a dream that she wants you to bring to life.  The Present is a hard time, and I know it is especially hard for you right now, but think of being a mother.  Realize that you are giving birth through the narrow birth canal of Now.  Our dreams come out kicking and screaming and it hurts, but this will bring you joy.  Rilke says, "Every happiness is the child of a pain it thought it would not survive" and these are times when our dreams press so heavy against our hearts that we can barely breathe.  


It feels like they are going to kill us, but we probably could not live the dream as we are now.  We have to die, because when we look at the dream-come-true face to face, it would seem that both it and we too had to be born again.  Remember when St. Paul wrote, "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.  Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood" (1 Cor 13:12).


Your dreams of winter are beautiful, and even though you think you "have not met real winter yet," I would say you have.  In your dreams, you met the part of winter that, if you loose it, whether or not you have snow on the ground, the chill on your skin or lights on the trees; it makes no difference.  


Because if you loose that part of winter, you loose the snow in your soul, the chill on your spirit and the lights in your mind.  If you loose that part of winter, you could never appreciate winter at all.  Many of us can't appreciate the fact that the dream came true and so we trod the snow underfoot and curse the cold that reddens our cheeks.  

So hold unto that part of winter, but most of all love that part of winter, because when you meet it, your grateful eyes will remind us that we all are living one another's dreams.  Your hope opens your eyes to that, which we are blind to, and so in some sense, you are closer to it than we are.  The secret is that we are all close to it and this is what friends are for.  We are only as far from our dreams as we are from friends who help us see them clearly.  In the writing of these words, I hope I was a friend as much as you have  been to me.


Sincerely,


Sam