Why do we dream?

The words «dream», «dreamer» somehow imperceptibly fell out of use. Rather, they moved into a number of ironic and even pejorative ones. It happened, one might say, quickly. Less than a hundred years ago, the journal Notes of Dreamers was published in Russia, organized by the Symbolists. That is, the word was still respected, attractive and full of meaning. Today, such a name would threaten the publisher with a commercial failure.

The school literature course played a role in this. The comically dreamy projector Manilov, the benevolent inhabitant of the sofa Oblomov, or the sensitive and hysterical dreamers of Dostoevsky. It has become fixed in the mind that dreamers are passive, beautiful-hearted people, deprived of the practical skill of arranging their own lives.

The Soviet ideology approached this from the other side. She sang of active dreamers who were «born to make a fairy tale come true.» Each holiday began with a life-giving charge of a song from a loudspeaker: “Dream! The children of the eagle tribe must dream!” On a historical scale, this optimism inevitably caused persistent allergies in future generations.

Now any schoolchild knows that one should not dream, but act, and that one should not live in the future, but one should be able to appreciate the present. Both of these are, in general, true.

But, as often happens, an enthusiastic impulse is followed by a prejudice, which to a person seems to be a hard-won and sober conviction. This is exactly what happened with the concept of dreams.

Meanwhile, without realizing it, we indulge in a dream every second. That is, we think about the future. At least about tonight or tomorrow morning. We make plans. For summer vacation, for example. Thinking about the future of the child. The lover draws in his mind the plot of the upcoming date. The journey, too, is first lived in the imagination. Etc.

The dream actually organizes our life, giving it meaningfulness and expediency. We can’t take a step without her. Everything that is, we first imagine, and then embody. That is, it is not being that determines consciousness, but consciousness itself is driven by our ideas. In essence, a dream is a synonym for creativity. You can hear: «I dream of building a house on the sea.» Or: «…buy a yacht.» Or: «… to get a couple of dachshunds, which Chekhov had.» A house, if it is built as imagined, is a pure example of creativity. A yacht and dachshunds, for example, no. But both that, and another, and the third appeared according to dream.

Thus, the question of whether a person needs a dream is simply not worth it. In essence, they condemn only excessive daydreaming, dreams that replace real life, turning it into a bargaining chip for virtual existence. Here, too, there is nothing to argue about. In excessive quantities, even bread and water are harmful.

Seriously, only the quality of the dream can be discussed, because it will already be a conversation about values ​​and what the Greeks called eudaimonia. The simplest translation of this word is “happiness”. That is, the quality of a dream determines how happy a person is. More broadly speaking, eudaimonia implies that bliss and utility are the motive and goal of all human aspirations and lead him to satisfaction with life in general.

Happiness is also understood as luck. But luck is momentary, it comes and goes. Wealth and prosperity. They sooner or later lead to stagnation and boredom. Career achievements also have a limit and, in any case, do not completely saturate the soul, like wealth. Familiar psychologists say that the largest group of their patients are middle-class people aged about 40 who have achieved everything they dreamed of, and suddenly felt an acute insufficiency of what they had achieved, which led them to a psychological crisis.

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That is, any dream aimed at the final, material result is, in some way, a path to a dead end. Only endless aspirations can make a person happy. What form these aspirations acquire within a person, only he knows. The desire for justice, beauty, love — yes, but for the experience of the individual, all these are just general words. Such a dream has nothing to do with journalism and does not need to be proclaimed. This is an intimate desire that has grown, perhaps, from some kind of childhood incident, from some kind of relationship experience, a flashed feeling or image. A person wants to return, or rather, to embody what he once understood and felt as a shot of happiness. Or, on the contrary, to bring something into the world, the presence of which he clearly felt inside precisely because he was desperately lacking it in the life around him. Around this secret dream are concentrated all other small dreams and desires, achievements, gains and losses, highlighted or crystallized — as you wish — by a big dream.