“Dreams are the mirages of hope” – as seen in the Graffiti comic strip.
When I saw that on the comics page of the paper, I thought “how profound”; then I looked up the term mirage and thought some more about it. Dreams may be mental mirages – mere illusions that our sub-conscience plays out in our unguarded moments of sleep.
However, dreams can also be a fantasy achievement of our hopes; and as such they are not so much an illusion, but
may be a road map concocted in our imagination to show us how to achieving those hopes. Dreams allow the constraints that we place upon ourselves to drop away. Fears that hold us back while we are awake can magically disappear in our dreams.
The term “mirage” is actually a well understood naturally occurring phenomenon that involves seeing things in the distance that aren’t really in the places that they appear. It is in most cases and optical illusion, but the key thing is that it does involve real objects somewhere.
A dream based upon hope is sort of like that, too. It is not all just made up; it involves real goals and aspirations that you have and hope to achieve. So perhaps dreams, like mirages, allow us a closer view of a distant object (or hope). If so, that’s not a bad thing.
Do you have dreams based upon your hopes? Do they help keep those hopes alive? If so, they’ve served a good purpose.
Perhaps Aristotle had it more right when he said – “Hope is a waking dream.”
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[…] I’ve posted here before3 about dreams, see the post What’s in your Dreams? […]