Author with sculpture “Little Nis” by Danish artist Thomas Dambo in Kentucky’s Bernheim Forest- summer 2021
Dreams are not only fanciful imaginations that flit through our ever-fickle minds. They are a beautiful part of humanity. Each person is born with varying gifts and desires in their heart. Most people nurture those desires over the years towards an end that is uplifting to themselves and their fellow humans, some people fall asleep to their dreams, or dismiss them out of self-consciousness and pressure from society to abandon such silly ideas. A small, but heartbreakingly effective, number of people make choices along their life path to nurse dark dreams of harm towards others to steal the hope or dignity of their fellow humans, to even kill people, or destroy the good that exists. Those too, are dreams, but terrifying, evil ones, and we can all name a few people in our lives or from history who dreamed nightmarish dreams onto the world.
There are vastly more good dreams in the world- Beautiful, grand, restorative, and even simple dreams living in the hearts and minds of people all around us and on every continent. It is our ability to have hope and imagine possibilities, to see in our minds things that are not yet in reality in front of our eyes, that helps us help each other. This ability inspires our music, art, buildings, technology, medical advancements, social justice changes, and civilizations.
There is a heartbreaking aspect of having a dream. We can see it and feel it strong enough to climb mountains of obstacles to make it a reality, but sometimes life rips out our heart and stomps on it during our quest. Sometimes we are born into forms that refuse to cooperate with the dreams on our hearts. One of my friends, a poet who delighted in the simple life of being a wife, mother, and writer, died suddenly of a health issue in her 30s and with her, died all of the poems that were forming in her mind that had never yet been spoken, and all of the moments she imagined experiencing with her husband and son. The death of a person means the death of all the unrealized dreams budding inside. Conversely, if a person lives without even the simplest of dreams on their heart- no desire to learn more or seek connection, no thoughts to visit a new park tomorrow or build a career, to help a friend, they often do not WANT to live. Their hope is gone. If anyone reading this feels this way, take it from someone who knows: Start dreaming- One small dream for today that you can celebrate accomplishing, even if it is simply “I will open my eyes and look for one beautiful thing today- a flower, a smile, a funny show.” Then dream little dreams again and again until suddenly your mind will wake up to life and dream bigger dreams. I promise you will be glad you chose to stay.
I watched a video called “The Girl Who Lives in a Bowl” and it changed my life. Rhama Haruna from Nigeria, lived in great pain. Her arms and legs never developed properly, so she lived to be 19, but she only grew to be large enough to fit in a bowl, in which her family carried her around or placed on a wheelchair to visit relatives. Her decision to live in a state of gratitude and to dream “impossible dreams” despite her condition, deeply moved my heart. The lines that struck me most were as follows:
Narrator: Despite the challenges she faces, the brave teen is full of hope for her future.
Rhama: I thank God for everything that I do. I want to start a business. A grocery store that sells everything, that is what I want.
Understanding this about our shared affinity for dreams is integral to nurturing empathy. People around you are not actors in your shared scene. They are filled with hopes for their own life. The people across the sea in a nation that we may never visit are dreaming visions for the business they want to start, the lunch they will cook for grandma, the education they desire to pursue. The people that may look different from you on the outside are astoundingly similar to you on the inside. It is the simplest truth, but the crux of many horrors acted upon our fellow humans, such as the Holocaust, slavery, and wars between nations. THE OTHER is feared or diminished, but what if THE OTHER is equally capable of loving their family, creating a beautiful work of art, giving water to a thirsty dog, and dreams of being an accountant just like your younger sister does? Suddenly, THE OTHER is a lot harder to fear. Now when a story on the news shows hordes of people fleeing their country which is bombed to smithereens, they are no longer faceless OTHERS relegated to refugee camps, but people like your father who dreamed to retire and spend time gardening. Now he is tragically ripped from all things familiar. The house and garden bombed, the company he retired in, along with and the retirement funds hard won, disappeared in the smoke. The people who were stolen from their countries, one minute making plans for marriage and planting crops for their villages, dreaming of the harvest, were separated from their homes to live as slaves to people across the ocean. Then generations of dreaming humans were born into a life of subjugation, never even seeing the respect and dignity due a human being, let alone having the chance to live out the potential visions they could have brought to the world. They were people like you who dreamed of having a quiet Saturday to rest and enjoy a new hobby, but instead toiled in back-breaking work for land that they weren’t allowed to own, separated from family and culture, and treated as lower than a dog. Once you start dreaming and feel the joy of building those dreams or allow yourself to understand the crushing disappointment of broken dreams, I hope it inspires empathy for those who have their fragile dreams shattered by circumstances outside of their control.
Dreams display our unique minds and inspire connection with people around us. I love the way that Steve Harvey describes imagination using a commonly quoted scripture from the Bible Hebrews 11:1-3. In the video, Harvey explains that we all have the ability to hope and to see visions in our minds that no one else can see. The amazing gift is that we have the ability to work towards making what is unseen, visible to all. As an artist, I connect with this idea, because the artwork that I create started as an idea in my mind. I can see the image clearly formed. I can describe it to someone, but it isn’t until I tear and glue layers of paper, apply some paint and transfer my vision from my mind to the physical artwork that other people can see and understand the vision I saw so clearly. As Steve Harvey explains, not everyone is going to understand your vision. They can’t see it. It is either not their dream to work towards, or you have to do more work to inspire them to see it too. The artist Thomas Dambo delights me, because I imagine that at some point along his journey, if he spoke his dream aloud to people that hadn’t seen his work, they would laugh. If he said, “I’d like to create giant troll sculptures out of reclaimed wood and leave them in parks and forests around the world and people will pay me to do it,” I can only imagine the reactions. Yet, his work is magical. People of all ages who flock to the paths that feature his sculptures and countries around the world, including America, beg to have him create the giant troll sculptures in national forests and gardens. It was my dream to see one in person, so I was quite happy when visiting my cousins in Kentucky, we visited Bernheim Forest to experience the family of trolls there.
The dreams of other people more often increase delight and beauty in the world. Dreams inspire restoration, as with the people who work towards creating a cleaner, more abundant planet. The dreams of individuals throughout time have engendered restoration of people groups and civilizations. On January 17th, 2022 in America, we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who worked tirelessly to create his dream of equality for Black people and inspired people of all backgrounds then and now to also see, hear, feel, and desire his dream.
“Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today my friends — so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…
This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.” (source)
His dream was hard won in a climate that hated him for speaking the dream he saw clearly in his mind and heart. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. held onto the dream and worked to make it a reality until his life was snuffed short by someone who was filled with hate and fear of the dreamer. The assassin habitually dreamed dreams of destruction throughout his life, misusing people, and built a dream of hate towards his fellow humans. This is the power of dreaming in a life lived long or short. Choosing to fuel your dreams, however long we have to dream them, with love and hope instead of fear and despair is a matter of life and death, for individual souls and the soul of a nation.
The simplest application of this human essence of dreaming, or envisioning, is to recognize the dreams on your own heart and mind. They exist as a result of your unique genes and a million little choices you have made in life- to pursue hope, or not. The dreams born of hope and love are worth drawing out into your life and into the world. You live on a planet filled with billions of dreamers, the majority of whom are also choosing to fill their minds with simple, beautiful dreams. Cherish those dreamers and empathize with their struggles. Grieve for the loss of those dreamers whose dreams died before they had a chance to make them a reality. Find ways to support the dreams of your fellow humans who are suffering under the weight of illness, injustice, or circumstance. If the visions are born from a place of hope and love, don’t let the inability of others to see or understand your dream, stop you from building it. This poem speaks to a lover, but ultimately, it addresses our shared humanity, that rich or poor, powerful or weak, in the end, we all have dreams. Fragile human, please dream those dreams, and tread softly.
He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Scottish poet William Butler Yeats, Nobel Prize for Literature recipient 1923
Blog post by FRAGILE HUMAN dreamer, Laelia Watt
B.A. Creative Writing, 2009, University of Arizona
FRAGILE HUMAN 