A Good Dream is Hard to Find

Dreams should be like lovely mountain villages in the clouds, places where our future selves will live in a state of elation. Because we construct them in our imaginations, we fall under the illusion that they are subject to us. But dreams misbehave badly, eventually becoming taskmasters over us. 

I know this because I was four years old when I first dreamed of becoming a writer, a published novelist. My father was a writer, so it could be assumed that I simply had a child’s desire to emulate a parent. At 11, I asked the dream if it was indeed mine, or a borrowed one. From its cloud-wrapped perch in the future, it answered that it was mine, had always been mine, and  that it came from that same primeval soil from which my psyche was fashioned. So, I took it at its word and began marching towards it like an obedient soldier. 

It took over four decades for the dream to manifest. Plenty of time to learn that though the dream itself changed little, it would change me. For much of that time, consumed with the practicalities of becoming an adult, establishing a (bread-earning) career, and forming a family, I could only be a writer in the margins. I wrote in the slivers of time after the workday and before leaving the office. For writing sprints, I would use my vacation time. The dream found this insufficient; it didn’t like being relegated to the outskirts of my life. It also didn’t appreciate my withholding the intensity of emotion needed to write good literary fiction, emotional energy I needed for other purposes, say, to be functional in my life. 

So, for long periods of time, three years at one point, as a matter of survival, I’d stop writing altogether. I learned how to create a certain emotional stasis, which relieved me of the burden of being an observer of the human condition. Then, there was the fact that like another fully fledged person, I had other dreams, which, too, needed to be longed for, and to which I gave my attention. 

In revenge for this idolatry, the dream decided to become even more unattainable, while simultaneously strengthening its pull. The act of allowing myself to write only in certain years, and in the margins, became even more strenuous – a sort of ongoing denial. In the meantime, I found that, as numbingly difficult as learning how to write was, the road to getting published was a different kind of purgatory, a task of reaching out to and then racking up scores of rejections by potential agents. I learned to accept my punishment, rationalizing that it was still better than dream-hunger, that dry-mouthed anxiety you feel when you’re not even putting in the time that helps you maintain the high-wire delusion that what you long for is just around the corner. 

When at last I was officially a published author, at the end of 2024, I asked myself what it felt like to attain the dream. It felt damn good, like water flowing down to the very root. But, I had to survey the wreckage. The dream had made me into an indentured servant, a prisoner, a follower. It had its finger over the light switch. It was light, and yet it was a black hole from which even light could not escape. Perhaps the greatest sign of its malfeasance, its utter dominance, is that I still wouldn’t have it any other way.