First We Dream

 I find it interesting to note that we never stop dreaming no matter our age.  The youth is awash with dreams and for us older folks we still do albeit a bit differently now but we do just the same.  And so I muse about dreams but first I poke fun with our animal friends who don’t, or do they? 

We all dream and apparently it’s another one of those attributes, as far as we know, that are exclusively human; notwithstanding claims from pet owners that cats and dogs do dream. We dream while sleeping, and we daydream when in a boring class or meeting, but the most important dream is the one that we willingly and forcefully engaged in to motivate ourselves. It’s not to be mistaken with wishful thinking which sometimes takes us to a dream-like state – mere ghostly thoughts without flesh and force and therefore no inertia to make us do anything.

First, let me muse about whether animals dream.  We can’t know if they do and you all know why.  Animals can’t talk (at least not to us or in the language we can understand) so they can’t tell us if they do, let alone explain to us what they dreamt about the night before or after a nap.  They can’t daydream because when they’re awake they have more things to occupy their brains with, such as their next meal, predators to worry about, and their young to protect and feed.

Cats probably have the most time to dream but they may not.  If they’re not napping, which is what they do 90% of the time, the brain is constantly priming the coiled spring of muscles waiting for the whir of the can opener. Dogs on the other hand spend their waking hours trying to please the master when he or she is around or spend much of its energy anticipating for the master to come home.  It is a behavior cats disdain or one they have a hard time comprehending.

Do animals dream to better their station in life as to have ambitions? Perhaps, they do?  It’s possible, in a limited way, maybe?  Well, let’s allow ourselves to become animal whisperers and ponder for a moment. Take the gazelle or the impala.  They dream to run faster than the predators that go after them; or, at the very least, run faster than the next gazelle.  Here’s a case where they don’t have to place first in the race for as long they’re not last. Their dream is simple, not too overly ambitious but it means their survival. Mediocrity, as in average, in the savannah is all right, but being dead last is not, emphasis on dead. On the other hand, let’s take the cheetah.  Its dream or ambition in life is to run faster than the gazelle.  For hundreds, if not thousands of years, it’s been an arms race for these species. As impalas and gazelles run faster and faster the cheetahs worked on developing outsized hearts, capacious lungs, an extremely arched back, non-retractable claws and long tails that act like rudders and burst to a 70-miles-per hour sprint, but only for about thirty seconds or less. Single track dreams, single minded ambitions are all it takes.

Now, the dream to run very fast to catch the fleeing impala is admirable but has the cheetah, at one time or another, not dream about switching their pursuit towards the slower animals?  For example, why not aim for the aardvark and the vlakvark (just a fancy name for warthogs)?  This proves my theory that animals don’t dream very much. This is not to say that there is no nobility in their character.  I found out in my research that in 1904 the cheetahs had a convention on the arms race.  In that convention it was proposed that the contest with the speedy prey must end. Included in the resolution was a proposal from a small but vocal and liberal group of cheetahs who proffered (that’s not a typo – it’s the appropriate word) that they become vegetarians. It was taking its toll on their adaptive ability to keep up, coupled with the fact that often times the prey they catch are snatched away from them by the bigger lions who don’t like cheetahs very much or by laughing hyenas who, in the animal world, provide an even more perverse meaning to the phrase, “adding insult to injury”. They take away the cheetah’s catch and laugh about it as they gorge on the free meal.

The resolution at the convention was almost voted in for adoption except for a passionate speech made by one cheetah.  A portion of the quote went, “The impalas and gazelles, if allowed to increase their population, will graze the plains to a dust bowl.  The slow moving lions can’t catch them.  No offense to our feline cousins but compared to us they are lumbering brutes.  Impalas and gazelles will have a run of the savannah; watering holes will run dry as more and more of them put a strain to the supply of grass and water.  We are the only ones who can control their population. If not us, who will”?  That was the clincher to thwart the resolution to switch prey or turn vegetarian. The cheetah motto lived on – “If not us, who will”?  The slower impalas and gazelles are caught and therefore not allowed to procreate and the fast ones survive and pass on their genes to their descendants who will run even faster.  Cheetahs that are slow to catch impalas die out and the fast ones get to have families and also pass on their genes.  The arms race continues but the dreams remain simple.

Now we ask for the more serious question, what about us?

There was a little known Broadway musical in 1997 that ran only for three months, a mere 76 performances called “Steel Pier”.  It was obviously unmemorable as musicals go but there was a beautiful song in it that I thought was very meaningful and worth checking out in I-tunes.  It was entitled, “First you dream”.  Its opening stanza went:

First you dream,

Dream about incredible things

Then you look

And suddenly you have wings.

You can fly, you can fly

But first you dream

That is what makes us human. First we dream. Then we go after it.  Everything we have today – the discovery of the new world, birth of nations, modern farming, mass production, etc. all took seed and germinated from a dream by one person or a group of people who share the same dream. And every now and then throughout history there are even nobler ways to dream, to dream for the people, for a nation – from Washington who conceived of the idea of a free state to Martin Luther King whose dream speech moved a generation.  There were many before them and certainly more in the future after them – dreamers all.      

Rene Descartes said his famous line, “I think, therefore I am”.  Descartes and philosophers like him were thinkers, and we therefore give them credit for advancing human thought and intellectual discourse. But inventors, discoverers and founders had dreams. From Galileo to Columbus to Abraham Lincoln to Hiram Moore to Carnegie, Henry Ford to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Dell and Bezos, dreams were what they had first before everything else. So for them I coin the line, “I dream, therefore I do”.

We all dream, in big ways and small.  We may have pined for the dream girl, the dream boy, the dream job, the dream home.  None of what we do to get us to better our lives begin without first dreaming about it.  But neither should we limit our dreams to a collection of material possessions, nor social status and career.  It is not the dream home we should aspire for but a home where someone is free to dream. Where a mother can dream for her child or where two people can dream for each other.  No matter what our age is – from the youthful dreamers to those whose youth are mere memories – dreams must continue for as long as tomorrows keep coming our way. 

Borrowing a couple of quotes from Lerner and Lowe’s Camelot, “Each evening from December to December, before you drift to sleep upon your cot think back of all the things that you remember”, then dream the dream that could be as simple as just having a “congenial spot for happily-ever-aftering”.  We’ll wake up in the morning to another tomorrow. But first we dream.