only dreaming.

A dream is a story , or an experience , fabricated by your mind when you’re at your most vulnerable. Anyone who’s seen DiCaprio’s ‘Inception’ knows exactly what I’m talking about. But let’s stray away from the theological aspect of the definition of dreams and discuss the social aspect of it.

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As adolescents, and young adults if you will, we dream a lot. We dream of a cleaner, “better” world, depending on our individual perception of the word ‘better’. We look to our future because in a few years, maybe ten , maybe two, we are the future. The decisions we make now, directly affect the consequences we face tomorrow. Enough pressure? If that’s not enough, given the frenetic world we live in right now, with the advancement of technology, changes we never imagined were necessary, we believed only existed in science fiction novels have manifested into reality. Careers that were scoffed at, maybe twenty years ago are now billion dollar companies and the traditional hierarchy of employment superiority is obsolete. Today, we can be anything at all, anything we want, literally anything we can dream of.

But that’s the catch. Ever since we walked into secondary school, at ten years old, our picture books were replaced by textbooks, creative activities by assignments and slowly but surely we were trained to reject the colorful and imbibe the black and white. We classified our friends, who we liked, who we didn’t, which teacher was ‘cool’ and which was a ‘bore’. We formed our own circles, and never stepped out of those circles unless forced by circumstance. We were taught to be ‘realistic’, to ‘grow’ out of disney movies and to take to documentaries, video games and ‘grown up stuff’. Is being a child so bad? Funnily enough, when you’re a kid, all you want to do is grow up and be taken seriously, and when you’re finally grown up, you want to go back to the freedom of being a kid. What did you want to be, when you were a kid? I wanted to be an air hostess, fly to different places, meet many people ( and well,also probably because five year old me wanted to be pretty like them).

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We dreamed freely until we were told to be ‘realistic’. We restricted ourselves, inhibited by our ‘capabilities’ , imprisoning ourselves in what we ‘can do’ from ‘what’s possible’. Everything began with a dream, an idea. Someone dreamed that man would be able to fly, and he did. Someone dreamed of the phone you’re holding in your hand right now, and the laptop you’re looking at and the bulb that’s glowing in your room or the fan that’s keeping you comfortable. Everything, from the room that you’re sitting in, to the toothbrush you use every morning was once “just a dream.”

“You’re only dreaming”, they say. Well, at least I am dreaming. At least one of us is looking for the opportunity to manifest their dreams into reality, because you see, the thing with ‘reality’ , is that it is never constant. Reality constantly changes, it chases idealism. What was reality ten years ago, is far from the reality we know now. If we continue remaining content with the reality we have right now, by the time we graduate, ‘reality’ will have left us far behind. Every year, man introduces some ‘revolutionary’ technology, some small ( or huge) change in the market. By the time we graduate, as responsible citizens ready to accept and affect change, we have to be able to look forward, we have to learn to accept what we will have then, and dream beyond the walls of ‘reality’.

One of my favorite quotes by Theodore Roosevelt goes like this, “ Keep your eyes on the stars and your feet firmly on the ground”.

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Dreaming is the first step to achieving every extraordinary thing. And each and every one of us unique and gifted individuals is capable of something extraordinary. So do not restrict yourself from dreaming, the stuff you dream of today may be your reality in the next few years, all you have to do is work hard to make that dream manifest itself into reality. You are limited only by your imagination.