Chasing dreams

And how to catch them

Photo by Dagmara Dombrovska on Unsplash

A wise woman once told me that she prefers to reframe dreams as ambitions. She felt there was something flimsy about dreaming that might reduce a genuine intention into an ephemeral ‘maybe’.

I subscribe to the same view, and am always surprised when I’m reminded that others don’t. Ambition was a dirty word for women when I was growing up - too grabby and masculine. I spent years trying to mould my own dreams into something palatable that made enough space for someone else’s - it was an utterly reductive and deluded way to live. Recently I have started to pay much closer attention to what I want and really interrogate my desires.

I think that my stubborn determination to dream big beyond my sleeping hours stems from an messy combination of nurture, privilege and frustration. I was told by my parents, particularly my dad, from a very early age, that I could do anything I wanted with my life. I believed him, and it has instilled in me an idealism that can also be my downfall. My expectations for life and what I can achieve are high, but over the years, my view of this world as my oyster has been forced to shift in order to accommodate the challenges I juggle.

But the frustrations I experience as a result of those challenges fuel my desires, and even if they feel a bit harder to reach it’s important to me that I frame them as possibilities rather than pipe dreams.

It’s like that Rilke quote, ‘That is the principal thing - not to remain with the dream, with the intention, with the being-in-the-mood, but always forcibly to convert it all into things.’ The key word for me here is ‘forcibly’ - I want to act on urges and hopes and effect change in my life. I expect it’s all tied up in the restlessness I can’t quell.

‘That is the principal thing - not to remain with the dream, with the intention, with the being-in-the-mood, but always forcibly to convert it all into things.’

Rainer Maria Rilke

One of my current ‘dreams’ is to move to a city. I do the predictable Rightmove scrolling and stare longingly into estate agents’ windows just like so many of us do. It’s why people read

The Sophist

on here - because she is really funny of course, but also for the what if-ness of gorging on images of houses we’ll never buy.

But I don’t just want to scratch this itch by dipping into Rightmove now and again. I want to actually move to a city, even though the odds are hugely stacked against me being able to do so: I don’t think I earn enough to get a mortgage on a different home, one of my children is settled at school, the others are not but one of them has funding attached my current local authority, I don’t have a proper job because I am a full time carer and I’m a self-employed writer, the list goes on…..Any rational person would look at my life and say stay where you are Caro, you are safe and you are settled. And then I feel greedy for wanting something different, because safe and settled is worth so much (and I say that as someone who has experienced long periods of not feeling safe or settled.)

But ‘no’ is fuel for me and it only makes me want something harder. There’s something about being told my desires are unrealistic that riles me, because I am reminded of the millions of times people have said no and been forced to keep battling.

So I weave plans in my mind, try to block out the many voices in my head telling me I want too much. I speak to friends who are unsurprised by the strength of my desires and tells me it is ok to want a big life. After these conversations I feel validated but also annoyed that I need this validation. But all of this plotting and exploring, all of this dreaming, is part of the process of making my dreams come true. Wislawa Szymborska says it better (WS says everything better) - ‘in our dreaming…at times even a clear-cut meaning may slip through’. In other words, it is through explorations and imaginings that answers might be found: dreaming with intent.

‘…in our dreamings/in their shadowings and gleamings/in their multiplings, inconceivablings/in their haphazardings and widescatterings/at times even a clear-cut meaning/may slip through.’

Wislawa Szymborska

Twelve Moons started as a scared desire to write myself back onto the page. It was more than a dream, it was an act of reclamation and, more practically, an attempt to carve a new career for myself from nothing as my world span out of control and I was left with only stolen minutes in which to earn a living. Today I am filled with different scared desires, but I am hopeful that I can turn them into something more tangible.

I wrote something the other day about feeling small but mighty, how I am a mixture of vulnerable and fierce. And so it is with the tentative hopes I have for a bigger life.

‘I have spread my dreams under your feet/Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’

W.B Yeats