How to keep your dreams alive

On being a dreamer, wanting too much and - I'm moving to Paris

I could feel the dream dying. I was trying to clasp its bony, clammy hand in mine at Woodberry Down reservoir, but it was slipping away. How do you keep a dream alive? Do you tell yourself silent, soothing stories about it each night before falling asleep? Do you recount grand plans to friends because talking about something means it isn’t really dead? Or make endless, swooping lists in journals that go unfulfilled?

Sometimes I think I want too much. The days drag on like an endless ache. To dream is to ache and to ache is to live. The day I let my dreams die is the day I die myself.

A dream is slippery. Once it is out of your grasp, it’s easy to convince yourself that you never really wanted it in the first place. Or perhaps you wanted it once, but not anymore. Or you wanted it then, but you want what you have now even more. Letting a dream die is easier than letting it live. If you keep it alive, you must succumb to the endless ache. You must feed it scraps at midnight when your mind wanders or else hide it beneath work and laundry and endless mundane to-do lists that stand in the way.

A dream is a north star. It’s the biro-scrawled sentence at the top of every new year’s resolution list. It’s the photograph perennially perched at the top of your Pinterest homepage. It’s the restless hunger of longing. The desire that knocks against your ribcage. How could you possibly push it down and forget? Not when it gnaws at your soul every night.

A dream is a substitute for a lover. It is romance. It is the mad, irrational whimsy of falling in love. When you love your dreams, they sometimes love you back. No situationship, no roster, so you fall asleep dreaming of the steps of Montmartre and writing outside cafes, the late April sun on your face. This is love as much as anything else is.

Bande à Part (1964)

I dreamed of moving to Paris in 2020 as a stopgap between the end of my master's and the start of my career. Then the pandemic threw everyone’s dreams and plans up in the air. Then Brexit collided with the pandemic. Then the dream felt far away. I moved to London and got a job. I built a life I liked. I could have lived like that forever.

Only I can’t let my dreams die. I smother them with attention like an overbearing mother. I hook them up to life support machines. I act as if my own life depended on it. It’s out of stubbornness and embarrassment as much as anything else. Dreams are everything to me; life, experiences, things unfurling.

It can take a nightmare to realise the importance of dreams. When you look the nightmare in the eye and life reveals how short and precious it is, dreams gain new urgency. Don’t let your dreams die. Do it now.

I have always been a big dreamer. When I was sixteen and only dreaming, not living, my therapist recalled a Yeats poem that reminded her of me;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

As a teenager, I felt fragile and overly sensitive because my dreams were so weighty yet uncertain. I had the capacity to dream deeply, but all it brought me was frustration. Dreams are like open wounds. Dreaming is a vulnerability.

After all, the dreamer is not always the achiever. Dreaming is not intrinsically poetic. It’s devastating to dream and to not achieve. The devastation is compounded by an internet culture that parades your failure for all to see. Lay your soul bare for zero likes. Lay your dreams out and feel naked and ashamed.

Dreams destabilise. They can destroy a peaceful life with all their overflowing, knotty want. They can bloat your quiet mornings with yearning or paralyse you with indecision. Being a dreamer isn’t all starry nights and soft moonlight. It sets you on a path to almost perpetual disappointment. Because some dreams will die. That can’t be helped. Others will rise from their ashes. Getting older is learning to dance in a graveyard of dreams.

Disappointment can morph into bitterness if you’re not careful. Starry-eyed dreaming must not be replaced with cynicism. Dreaming is the essence of youth. The day you stop dreaming, wanting, yearning, aching is the day you give in to the end. Dreaming is botox for the soul. Dream like an impractical child then plan with all the knowledge you have learned since.

I am moving to Paris in March to live the dying dream. The one that would have slipped away if it hadn’t kept insisting on itself. It dug its sharp nails into the soft parts of my heart. It would have haunted me forever.

Losing a dream is not the only way to kill it. Fulfilling a dream is another kind of death. Once my time in Paris is over, I will be dreaming of more, in Paris or elsewhere. I wish a soft, slow life were enough, but I am always wanting, wanting, wanting. Habits and routines bring me contentment yet they are not enough on their own. If habits and routines sustain a contented life, then goals and dreams are what we stay alive for.

Embrace the ache. Don’t let your dreams die!

Some things I’ve been enjoying this week:

The album New Fluffy Delicious by The Pearly Gatecrashers is a dreamy antidote to all this cold, grey weather.

I finished reading Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, a layered triumph of historical fiction and magic realism. I’m trying to read more 500+ page books this year as I’d forgotten how gorgeous it is to lose yourself in a story for weeks at a time.

The song Lark by Angel Olsen which reminds me of this piece I wrote on the nostalgia of past cities and past loves, particularly the lines; I could not come back the same, this city's changed/ It's not what it was back when you loved me/ Walking down that path we made when we thought/ What we had was such a good thing.

Thank you for reading! See you next week.

Sophie xo