On The Expiry Date Of Dreams

Getting lost in the chase. The ultimate pursuit, the pinnacle of a faultless imagination. Have you ever asked yourself the total number of dreams you have had throughout your life? Have you ever paused to ruminate on all the dreams you ever had? And what did you discover?

I never really consciously thought about this. Until I sat on a patch of grass next to a Seoul subway station, iced americano sitting in the folds between my fingers, and I heard the following:

'You know, when you chase a dream, you imagine the destination as this summit you have to ascend to, you pour your all into climbing this mountain, and you imagine, that when you finally get to the top, the view must surely be incredible. So high up, there must be valleys and ridges to look down upon. But then you get there, and it is all just flat.'

The moment a dream expires, because you have surpassed it.

The other day I sat down and tried to think of my dreams. One of my earliest dreams being to own this giant Diddl Plush. A soft toy that, at the time, was about the same size as me. The thought of getting to fall asleep in the arms of the giant mouse decorating all the crinkled paper balls on my desk felt like the pinnacle of everything I had wanted. I still remember to this day, I was five years old, one night I dreamt of living side by side this enormous plush, and when I woke up, I was swept by an insurmountable feeling we all know: longing for something you think you can never have. Little did I know, just a few months later, for my sixth birthday, I would be picked up from school by my mother with Miss Diddl strapped into the backseat. I had reached the summit. My dream was no longer a mystical fable, it materialized through my mother's love.

At ten, my dream was for my mother to recover, for everything to fall back into peace. We, being my mother, brother and I, had just moved into a two-bedroom apartment after my mother had taken us and courageously fled the shackles of abuse. She spent the nights sleeping on the two-person couch sitting in the kitchen, while my brother and I each had a small room to ourselves. Seeing her cry became a new normal, one of the most jarring moments being when she told us in a storm of tears that maybe our lives would be easier if she was no longer alive. I wanted nothing more than for her to be okay again. To not live in fear for my mother's life. As the years passed, this dream quietly fizzled along, and although it feels faded because everything did in fact get better, it never actually disappeared. I now understand that this is because it was never truly my dream, it was a dream dreamt in her place.

When I was fourteen, my dream was to meet Ed Sheeran. A lyrical and cordial soul I so desperately latched onto during my troubled and pain-sprinkled youth. Impossible right? How could I, of all people, ever meet the most successful musical creator of the current decade? Well, you are mistaken if you think that this story goes like how teenage-fan-fantasies usually play out. I did meet Ed Sheeran, not once, but in fact, I met him twice. The only reason I met him at all being my own determination. I so desperately wanted it to become reality, that at sixteen - coming out of a long hospital stay and a near death experience, I started an online-project and sent out letters to his manager's business emails - and it worked.

When I was eighteen, my biggest dream was for Tim to live again. The countless nights I cried myself to sleep were followed by even 'countlesser' of days I woke up into with the soul-shattering realisation that he was - in fact - still dead. I did not want to live in the universe his suicide was an actual reality in. Unlike my Diddl dream, this was a dream truly unattainable, at least in the ways I wished for. No amount of yearning and longing and suffering would ever allow me to hug, kiss or touch him again.

When I was twenty-one, my dream was to travel far and wide, move abroad and swim with a humpback whale. I was so caught up in my own suffering, that the thought of floating silently alongside one of the largest creatures to ever roam this planet felt like the apex of healing. During my days of trauma therapy, I imagined myself in the water with these magical creatures countless times. However, being as disabled as I was, I thought this would never become real. I could barely leave the house or work, how was I supposed to make it to the other side of the globe on my own and swim with a 60-foot, 40-ton mammal in a far-away ocean? Surely this must be where my dreaming has reached the climax of absurdity? Oh, but I did swim with a humpback whale just two years later, after I got onto a one-way flight to Japan. And so I scaled this mountain too.

Sitting there in the Seoul summer heat, living abroad and twirling my fingers in the dirt, for the first time I reflected back on all my naive dreaming and everything it had brought me. I had lived so many of my dreams and still I felt so unaccomplished. We think of dreams as some sort of benchmark, some ultimate reality in which we reach a state of endlessly unfolding contentment. My dreams had carried me so far, so much further than I ever thought, shouldn't I feel proud? Proud for making it further than I ever thought possible? I realised then, that dreams aren't a destination, they were never meant to be. To pursue a dream is to embark on a journey. It is a migration pattern of learning, self-discovery and reinvention. The point is not to find a dream and violently chase it to the summit. The entire point of dreaming is simply the state of dreaming, the hope it carries, the fuel it brings and the emotional branching it holds. A dream is a lifeline. A lifeline, that you get to pick, no matter how irrational or absurd it may be to others. Your dream could be to become the most successful fiction writer of all time, but it could also be to sit on the floor, staring at the first book in your very own bookshelf.

So it is okay, it is okay to leave a dream behind, to start a new one or abandon it entirely when you have outgrown your last. The only point is to never stop dreaming, because it will carry you so, so, so, so far.