How many times have we heard someone say, follow your dreams? It’s a wonderful mantra because it ties with one’s passion in life. If you’re not passionate about something, you might as well not bother to breathe at all.
I often gave that same advice to many of the students I had the pleasure to meet and serve while running a vocational college that taught broadcast media arts. Some of the students took my words to heart and truly became successful in the field of radio and TV or Internet broadcasting either behind the scenes, on the microphone, or in front of the camera. As much as I might like to think I had something to do with that, I know better. Whatever those students attained as professionals, they made their mark due to hard work, ambition, and talent. And the success wasn’t necessarily something local; one of my students went on to be the host of a national TV program, produced by MTV, about crimes that had gone unsolved and were in need of discovery.
But it was only after I began to write stories, a children’s book, and then a book featuring teenagers for adult consumption did I realize that maybe I hadn’t followed my own advice. Perhaps the adage, follow your dreams meant something completely different.
I discovered that my dreams were like gifts of revelation that helped me find solutions to that which I couldn’t solve or come to terms with.
In one of my dreams, a lullaby that sounded a lot like the Beatles song, “In My Life,” blissfully played as I interacted and shared a moment with someone who had crossed over the rainbow. No words were spoken, merely the flash of a smile that filled my soul with sunlight knowing my beloved was at peace.
In another dream, I finally was able to solve a problem with a piece of art I was trying to craft. I had tried to solve the predicament again and again in the light of day only to garner a solution that came to me during the twilight of sleep. I was so overwhelmed that I woke up, jumped out of my bed, dragged a comb across my head while grabbing pen and paper to record what had rattled in my head. There it was, plain and simple and yet so clever, but only something I could follow from one of my dreams.
Dreams often portend what the future holds. We know from the New Testament and the gospel of Matthew that the unnamed spouse of Pontius Pilate, venerated by the Oriental Orthodox Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church as Saint Procia interceded on behalf of Jesus, warning the Roman prefect to have nothing to do with that righteous man.
Besides Jesus, the only other person to have a dream with as much notoriety was the one Lincoln shared a mere week before John Wilkes Booth assassinated him. In the dream Lincoln descends a grand stairway in the middle of the night as whispering voices filled with tearful sobs fill a large room that is devoid of any other but a mahogany casket with someone lying in state. That someone, it turns out, is Lincoln.
Follow your dream…a mantra that sometimes leads to revelation and a device that a writer can definitely employ as Shakespeare did when he had Hamlet deliver the line, “To die, to sleep — to sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there’s the rub, for in this sleep of death what dreams may come?”
*Image by Anke Sundermeier from Pixabay
William Natale has a new book, “The Resurrection of Boraichee” — available July 13, via Amazon/Kindle or Anderson Book Shops.
