Remembering Your Dreams

Before the flakes of daily life landed on your shoulders and snowed you down. Before your last thoughts as you dozed off at night were about the scheduler on your Outlook. Before weekdays became chock-a-block and weekends were spent recuperating, what did you think of? What carried you off to cloudless sleep, what sprung you out of bed in the morning, what kept you going - forward on the treadmill, up the ladder, or down that garden path called life?

I spent so much of my teenage years in a permanent dream state. Sitting by my bedroom window gazing out at the twinkling lights of a city asleep, as Casey Kasem droned on for 40 songs. I dreamt of being Madonna, of being swept up on stage at a Duranduran concert like Courtney Cox was by Bruce Springsteen, of being a millionaire by 30, of the name to paint on my fleet of private jets, of my Oscar acceptance speech, of being on the cover of Cosmo, of being thin in pink legwarmers.....the dreams were many, and manyfold, with every detail imagined, enacted and relived day in, day out.

My twenties were spent inside a bottle of Absolut where I only came up for air every few months. Time imploded a little because I believed I was invincible and that everything would remain as it was forever. And the dreams, they slowly whittled away because who needs dreams when there are so many drinking games to play?

Sobering up now and smarting from mistakes of the past, I wonder why I walk listlessly, am constantly overwhelmed yet haunted by sleepness nights and a blank mind. I realised that, like many, I had forgotten my dreams, the intangible food that nourishes my soul.

We have become so robotic in acting out of instinct that we have lost the skill to analyse why is it we feel what we do (or don't). Why we crave. Why we urge. Why anything?

In order to live rather than exist, I've tried to recall my dreams. Do or die, there are things I need to get done or I will forever haunt this earth in a state of unrest. Oh, they range from the monumental (winning an Oscar for adapting something amazing for film or climbing Mount Everest [serious!]), to achievable if I got my arse together (publishing damn good written work), to the frivolous (finding the poppy field in Ismail Merchant's A Room With A View and once there, be passionately kissed as in the film). Possible or not, is not the issue.

Cleo-Jean reminded me of one thing. That it is now or never. While dreams may float about until you breathe life into them, our bodies sadly don't have that kind of shelf life. They wither away. What could be worse than having the will but not the capability? Why waste all the capability we have now on lack of will? Wake up! Get moving! It's now or never! You can't rely on your next life, what if you came back as a Freesian cow?