Where did your dreams go? I’m not talking about last night’s half-remembered journey into neverland. I’m talking about your real hopes and dreams. The possibilities and endless potential that you saw when you were a child. What happened to them?
Can you remember what they were?
Do you keep them safe and secure in the innermost chambers of your mind? Do you carefully unwrap them in quiet moments and wonder if you can still achieve some of them? Part of them? All of them?
Or have you resigned yourself to “reality” and come to accept that ordinary people like you and I are just faceless cogs in a machine? A machine that we can’t hope to understand because it doesn’t understand or care for us.
Have you come to accept that you are nothing more than wetware? Subservient, docile and easily manipulated not to dream of anything other than being “normal”? Have you settled for that?
What did it cost you? Did you suppress and choke the life out of your dreams just to fit in and be normal?
How cool was it?
Was it worth the price? Was that the sound of your soul screaming in protest as you let your childhood fantasies go and took that “steady job?” When did you lie, “it’s not forever”?Was it when you shackled yourself to the machine with your first piece of fantastic plastic? Did you even notice? Or had you already bought the false dream sold to you by slick salespeople masquerading as political and economic saviours?
Did you give a rat’s arse? Were you too busy drinking in the white noise of a society geared to consume individuality and regurgitate it in the form of unthinking consumerism?
Welcome to paradise.
Where did your dreams go really? Perhaps you’ve achieved everything you ever wanted. Perhaps not. Is this what you wanted? Did you ever let go really?
Where does your mind go when given space and time? Why is that? Do you have moments of joy? What brings them?
Do you dare speak of what you dreamt? Do you know others who have the same passions? How could you? So it goes.
Do you keep your light shining in the hope that someone might see it? Have you hidden it away, still burning in a darkened room? Your dreams are still there, aren’t they?
Do you dare dust them off and look at them? I mean really look with a child’s wondrous eyes full of hope and imagination. Are you intrigued by the possibilities? Can you imagine success in whatever form that is?
It’s never too late but it’s later than you think.
Dream on if you dare.
Originally published on my blog, markhodgetts.com