Life is a Dream

I've never had a world-class memory, so I can't recall word-for-word very many famous quotes from those I've wanted to memorize (or been forced to in school). But one of them remains firmly lodged in my brain to this day despite myself, ever since I first read it as a Spanish major back in the late 60s: Que toda la vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son. (For all of life is a dream, and dreams are only dreams.) It comes from a play of the same name by 17^th century Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca. His play asks, do we have free will? Or is our life predetermined?

Maybe it was the sonorousness of the Spanish words that grabbed me. Or my personal interpretation that a dream can be nightmarish, neutral, or nice, just like life as I knew it up to that point. Or maybe I suspected, even at such an early stage in my life, that it was true: life is a dream, and so maybe I shouldn't take it nearly as seriously as I had. Unfortunately, I didn't follow my own advice, and it was a couple more decades before I loosened up and started to really trip on the images flickering through my personal dream and stop worrying so much about the more important dreams I thought I should be having.

Nobody yet knows for sure why we're all here on Planet Earth, but there's no doubt that we're all busy being born, growing up, growing older, doing all sorts of things along the way, and then, inevitably, dying. I should warn you that the following is greatly oversimplified because I'm hardly a religious scholar, but I have noticed that theories about the "why" abound: we're put here by "God" to prove we're worthy of "Him" (e.g., Judeo-Christian/Muslim POV). Or, we're here in this dream to worship a multitude of gods and goddesses, who will grant us favors depending on our offerings and loyalty (e.g., Hindu, Afro-Caribbean). Or, we just don't know why we're here, but so what? Try to enjoy the ride anyway (e.g., existentialism). Or, Nature and all its creatures are our gods, and we just follow their dictates (pantheism, animism, Wicca). Then there's the religion of atheism, aka secular humanism, which utterly rejects "God" on the basis of no scientific evidence; or agnosticism, atheism's kinder, gentler cousin and amounts to philosophical fence sitting (maybe yes, maybe no). My personal favorites are Buddhism/Taoism/Jainism, atheistic/existentialist philosophies that posit that life is an illusion (i.e., dream) filled with suffering but you've got to slog through it with righteousness aforethought, and if you keep your ducks in a row and don't harm them, you will be rewarded in the end with Satori (enlightenment) and Nirvana (liberation from birth and death), the juiciest spiritual carrots of them all.

Now, I'm hardly the first human who has written about this subject. And I suspect that, if I were half the age I am now, it would have a very different slant. When you're 20- or 30-something, you're at the beginning of whatever life you've chosen. You feel physically invincible. You may be working on, or already have scored, the sexy mate, the 2.1 children, the nifty digs, and the dream job that you feel confident will keep you enthralled with life until the day you die or retire (which, of course, is far, far in the misty but ever-rosy future). You have lots of plans that you're sure will come to fruition. You look good, you feel good, you flatter yourself that you've got it all figured out, you tell yourself life is beautiful. And (sorry, but I've been there) you're generally deluding yourself. The wisest folks know better.

Or you may be one of those who never had a lucid dream about your life. Yeah, there were plenty of scenarios you considered and sometimes tried, but nothing ever quite panned out. You were not one of those irritating people who say, "I was born to be a blah-blah (fireman, lawyer, actor, mother, teacher, doctor, politician, business tycoon, writer, nuclear physicist, garbage collector, fill in the blank). There was never any question in my mind." Instead, you've remain clueless about your life/dream. Most of us start off there, and many of us don't find our way out of it. So we play with it, we tweak the script, we drink, we diet, we pop out kids, we write a book, we take pharmaceuticals, we go back to school, we become Scientologists, we start wearing red, we go to career counselors. To no avail. We come to consider our lives a nightmare from which we'll never awaken. We dither and dilly dally until the years that we used to see clearly see ahead of us are now kicking us in the butt. A moment ago we dreamed we were 18. Now we're 83.

But consider this. Why should it matter if you spend your life, nose to the grindstone, making all kinds of personal sacrifices, dreaming of becoming, let's say, a Supreme Court justice, and you fail at it? Or what if you find yourself spinning your wheels crazily, pursuing dream after transient dream, some of which are fulfilling and others not at all, and you succeed in that? I used to think the latter course was a terrible waste of time, and it happens to be how I have dreamed my life. But I no longer believe that. We all know about the mythical American Dream. If you believe that that's the only goal worth pursuing, you may end up with a nightmare instead.

The late mythologist Joseph Campbell said: Follow your bliss. If your bliss is to wander all over the map like a lost butterfly, never settling on any particular flower, then do it. And while I would hardly call animal rights advocacy "bliss" (in fact, it's a downright painful pursuit), I do call it my passion. All of us need a passion, which is just another word for dream, in order to make it worth our while to wake up in the morning (or what appears to be waking up!). And after so many years of self-flagellation, I've come to realize that serial dreams that don't include making buckets of money or winning a Pulitzer Price are just fine. I hope you find yours before you arrive at the end of your particular life.

Delectable Dream Quotes

Calderón de la Barca, dramatist:

Even in dreams good works are not wasted.

For I see now that I am asleep that I dream when I am awake.

Robert Goddard, rocket scientist:

God pity a one-dream man.

William Shakespeare, dramatist:

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.- The Tempest

Edgar Allan Poe, writer:

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

Robert F. Kennedy, politician:

Some men see things as they are and say "Why? " I dream things that never were and say "Why not?"

Xu Yunuo, poet:

What is a dream?

What is reality? Just a demarcation in human memory.

Federico Fellini, film director:

Our dreams are our real life.

Anais Nin, diarist:

Dreams are necessary to life.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, poet:

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

Chuang Tzu, Taoist:

I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?