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Requiem
for a Dream You
can believe that, or not. A lot
of people dream, don’t they? In fact, is a person without a dream really
human? I
lost my dream. In fact, I’d rather say it was stolen. When
children are young they dream a lot, their ambitions change a lot but by the
time you are thirty-five you tend to have one, realistic dream. I’m not
thirty-five yet but already my scope for dreams is narrow because my dream
got lost. When
I say lost, I don’t mean, I misplaced it. I don’t mean, the washing machine
ate it, like it does socks and I don’t mean the dog ate my homework either. I
lost my dream. It disappeared, rapidly, don’t they call that evanescence? To
disappear, rapidly. But whatever words you want to put it in the dream was
gone. Exactly
when it began to evaporate, fade away, die, I don’t know, all I know was that
I looked back over my shoulder for it and it was gone, like a wisp of smoke
trailing away or the sun hiding behind a cloud, something like that. I just
realised, “I don’t have anything I want anymore.” How
did I know what I wanted in the first place, anyway? I
suppose my dream was a ‘pipe-dream’, effectively, there was no way of making
it happen, it was just an idea and from a young age I had decided, “this is
what I want.” But when you realise the dream isn’t possible, is it really
fair to go on dreaming? Is it fair to the poor caged dream who’ll never get
to fly free? Or be forfiled? No. Like
the dreams we have as we sleep, they either have to be remembered, stored,
analysed and used or we forget them and they fade away, except my dream
wasn’t like that. I wanted my dream to come true, I wanted it for a long
time. I longed for it with the kind of idealism that only ignorance can
maintain and I suppose the lack of idealism led to the lack of dreams I had. I’m
sure I had plenty of other dreams aside from my main one, but they weren’t
important, I may even have some of them but the reason I dreamt is gone. I’m
not good enough to do it. I couldn’t reach out far enough to catch my dream
as it ran away. I couldn’t make myself think, “You can do it!” I couldn’t
make myself believe in dreams and so my dream is gone. I
know I said, “I’d rather say it was stolen” because in truth it was. Realism
stole it. It’s
like when you watch all those films and things and think “I want to marry a
guy like that…” You mean, you want the movie-star’s good looks and the
perfection only fictional characters can have, right? But wouldn’t marrying a
guy like that boring, I mean you’re probably yelling at the screen “Who wants
a regular guy with a regular nine to five job if you can have a guy like
that?” What does ‘a guy like that’ want from life, what do you really know
about him? He has less layers than a chocolate cake. You want a real guy,
they’re far more interesting, more complex. More layers than a wedding cake.
Just because he doesn’t wake up with perfect hair and fall in love with the
heroine straight off doesn’t mean he’s a bad person, does it? I bet that guy
on the screen has no ambitions, the movie-star wants his paycheque, sure and
the character is just his peon in doing so, what’s so good about that? That’s the kind of corruption realism bought me. My dream wasn’t about marrying characters played by good looking stars but if I could find a real person, a nice person that good looking – like the character in a film – I wouldn’t say no to a drink down the pub, I’m not stupid. But for the record, I do not believe that this is going to happen. Just as I believe my dream cannot come true, so I let go of it and it drifted |
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Requiem for a Dream |
