When I was young, I loved the words from the song “Dreaming” by Johnny Burnett:
Dreamin’, I’m always dreamin’
Dreamin’ love will be mine
The song “Motherless Child” by Richie Havens was my dirge. I never dated in high school. Never went to a dance or prom. I left high school a few months after just narrowly graduating so I could fight the communists in Asia. I had no particular hatred for them. They had never even been much on my mind. But I had no roots. No one to love me. No one who needed me. It was the easiest thing in the world to climb out my back window one night, go over to a friends house and join the military the next day. Only one soul knew where I went. I was not lost and I did not want to be found. I never regretted it.
It was over a year before my parents finally found out that I was now enlisted in the United States Air Force. My father wrote me a letter telling me that he was disowning me. I almost died laughing. He no longer had any influence over my life.
“Sometimes I felt like a motherless child, a long, long way from my home.” It was not always easy feeling alone and unloved. My first wife told the shrink that we saw before getting a divorce that, “I always thought everyone had feelings, but I learned that John has no feelings.”
I thought Spock was too irrational and not logical enough. I wanted to dream and think about the future but the saying “A dream without a plan is worthless” only made me feel incompetent. I could not think of any plans since I had no goals. The only thing I enjoyed doing was reading. I could spend hours in a library just reading anything that caught my fancy. My dreams were all in my books. My books were my best friends.
Still, it was not easy to pass up my dreaming songs. Somehow, if I could not dream, I could at least listen to others who could dream. “All I Have to do is Dream” by the Everly Brothers was another song that seemed to promise that someday I could find true love. Someone who really cared about me. But until then, all I had to do was:
Dream, dream, dream, dream
When I want you in my arms
When I want you and all your charms
Whenever I want you, all I have to do is
It is not easy going through life with only dreams for company. For many years, I thought love was a farce. I could never really attach myself to anyone or anything. It was no wonder that my first marriage ended. I still cannot understand how she stayed with me sixteen years. I look back on the husband and father that I never lived up to being with a great deal of regret and shame. I know I am not the only one stuck with these feelings but even if I knew the entire human race shared these feelings it would not make one bit of difference in terms of the sorrow I feel. “Get over it, I have been told.” “Forgive yourself and move on.” So easy to say.
Another dreaming song which I can still hear even when it is not being played is “Dream On” by Aerosmith. What struck me about their song Dream On was not just the music but the idea that dreaming itself was a form of survival.
Sing with me, if it’s just for today
Maybe tomorrow, the good Lord will take you away
Dream on
Dream on
Hard to believe that a teenager wrote these lyrics about life, success, and death finally coming to take it all away. But as long as we can keep on dreaming, we have something that neither God nor Satan can take from us. We need a dream which can be the vision that the Bible says people perish without.
Years later I discovered Viktor Frankl. Based on his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp, Victor Frankl wrote a book about survival in the Nazi Concentration Camps called “Man’s Search for Meaning.” He wrote that without meaning, we have no anchors in our lives. Nothing to live for. He argued that people survive through meaning. This was perhaps his most original idea.
Looking back, I realized that books had given me meaning before I ever found purpose.
When people lose a sense of purpose, they often experience what Frankl called an “existential vacuum”—feelings of emptiness, boredom, or despair.
But Frankl did not mention dreaming. Many of us find meaning or purpose in our lives by dreaming. My mother believed that some day she would win the lottery and we would all be rich. My sister dreamed of a better life since she insisted that she was really a princess who had been kidnapped by my pedophile dad.
In his “Dream Lovers”, Bobbie Darin put the words in my soul into a hit song:
Every night I hope and pray
I want a dream lover
So I don’t have to dream alone
I titled this blog, “When Dreaming is Not Enough.”
We can dream all day long, but will it really be enough to have a happy life. I cannot imagine a life without some dreams to live for but when does dreaming stop and life begin?
Can dreaming stop us from having the life we want to live by substituting fantasies for actions that we need to take?
Dreaming sustained me when I had little else. It carried me through lonely years, failed relationships, and unanswered questions. But dreams alone could never give me the life I wanted.
The people in my life—my first wife, my second wife, military friends, college friends, and friends from work—all helped move me closer to the life I wanted to live. Years of counseling helped me get rid of my OCD. Books taught me what life could be like for me. I no longer had a death wish that seemed to go continually unanswered.
At some point, every dream demands a choice. We can keep dreaming about love, purpose, friendship, or a better future—or we can take the risk of pursuing our dreams.
Dreams are where life begins.
Action is where life happens.
Aging Capriciously 