Time for a cup of dream

Dream

I saw this post of Facebook yesterday: a set of Paris images (always nice and dreamy) and a comment ‘a woman should always have time for a cup of dream’…

It rings true, doesn’t it. It sounds right even in our rational, cold, impulsive, 25-images-per-second world.

We get bored easily. We get tired easily. We meet, love, break up and move on too fast. We work too hard and forget to live. We live as if there is no end to our lives and we will have eternity to rest on our hard-earned laurels… Yeah, right.

We are so rational, so cold and so skeptic about everything we do, see, observe and.. feel. Feel? Do we feel anything anymore? Well, it is another story for another day.

We are on about DREAMS, dreaming, the need to dream. Do we? Do we really need to dream? Yes, we do.

Once upon a time I went to clairvoyant. I was in the middle of a messy divorce, cancer was ticking its clock inside my body. I had no job but I had my tiny miracle – my daughter. I needed guidance. I needed counselling.   This lady told me a lot of things. Some of them did come through. However, the thing I remember the most is that she told me to dream. She told me to never forget to dream, never to shut the door on the dreams and never to take somebody’s dreams as my own.

As a little kid my parents encouraged me to dream, to imagine to make up stories. As a teenager my dream world was my escape, my way of dealing with the cruel world outside. As a young girl my dreams took me to amazing places and heights. My dreams became aspirations, ambitions, goals. I was riding them like a friendly ocean wave. Nothing seemed impossible.

Then, I got married and stopped dreaming altogether. My husband saw assault and betrayal everywhere: in my notes, in my stories, in my poems and in my plans (Henry VII complex – if it does not exist yet, somebody should patent it). I stopped. I cried it all out. I feared it all out. I shut it. I shut it and closed it off inside. I became a shadow, a ghost a mere presence.

It’s been 13 years since my divorce and I still don’t dream. I can’t. I am a mother to a teenage girl, I am an only daughter to Russian parents, I work full-time and am running my own business. I have busy community life on top of it.  I do not have time or strength to dream. I have a lot of experience, pain, fear, failure behind me to know that dreaming can hurt as it is only that, dreaming.

However, my mum keeps telling me to dream, to let my imagination take me and to ride it wherever it will go. She keeps telling me. I keep telling myself that. But… how am I going to find time for a cup of dream each day. Any advice?