Just a quickie on the topic of ‘reaching your dream’. When interviewed after a success, sportspeople or talent contest entrants always speak of having attained their dream. Now, perhaps I have more mental problems than the average sprinter or boy band, but my dreams aren’t like that. They involve floating through the air only to arrive on stage acting in a part where I don’t know the words, or entering a college hall for an exam for which I have no knowledge at all. Walking around having lost my shoes is another recurrent dream. You get the point – I won’t go on – but the next time I win the Ashes or the Nobel Prize, be assured I will not tell the world that I have reached my dream.
The reason I won’t bang on about it is that there are few things more boring than someone else’s dreams. There’s a Bob Dylan song – Gates of Eden – where we are told “at dawn my lover comes to me, and tells me of her dreams, without the attempt to shovel them in to the ditch of what each one means …”. I suppose we must give the girl some credit: whilst Bob has to look interested whilst she drones on about her sleepy experience, at least she spares him the additional 30 minutes of amateur psychology.
Footnote: My stepson bridles at another cliche of successful athletes – “it was surreal !”. Like what ? Fish riding bicycles in a ginger coloured sky ? Limp stopwatches draped over willows ?
Grumpy Wisdom 