The Importance of Dreams...(and the risks)

I think dreams are the most important thing a person can have all to themselves in this life. Dreams, images or creations of something in your mind that you smell and taste and are tangible to your senses. They tug and pull you in their direction, around the bends and over the hills. Without them why would you move at all? But they can also hold you back, limit you.

Tonight I was walking around the small town of Montesano after sunset. I had just gone to the little gym downtown (4 blocks away) and it was completely empty. I had the place to myself as I worked out while reading a "Down East" magazine and listening to strumming guitar of Gillan Welch. I love Down East, not for the articles which have become trendy in the last 5-10 years, but for the images. For the words and phrases and pictures of Maine. Mostly, I read the real estate ads in the back that show me page after page of dreams. Pictures of homes and lives and places that have become part of my dreams in many ways.

What is it about Maine for me? Was it the summers on Islesboro? Is it Maine at all or is a home in Maine simply the externalization of a longing and dream I have had my entire life. I have never been really able to express it and yet to have found it, although I have come close a couple of times. This is where the danger of dreams lie, especially for those of us with the more creative and vivid imaginations. I have images in my head that have evolved over years and years and years. They are crystal clear in detail, in smell, in the feel of the autumn wind's chill on my cheeks. Since a very young age I have somehow felt that I never fit quite where I was and my mind conjured up the idea of a place just out of reach that I needed to find. It has driven my my entire life.

Tonight I found myself walking through this town of rustic old houses with wood stove smoke rising from the roof and warm light bending through the wavy old glass windows and I could see that image in my head again. Not just a place but a life. I see it in the ads of homes for sale amongst gold colored autumn trees near the back of my Down East magazine. A life I have never really known and have always felt was just over the next hill, bend in the road or person I would meet. Perhaps the next career or the next town I found myself in. Recently I found myself as close to that image as I ever have in my entire life and a single decision changed it. This is where the danger of dreams lie. In their ability to keep you second guessing the very place you are standing, now matter how beautiful it is.

How is life ever going to measure up to that image? As the years go by I find myself adding rooms, planting trees, watching the place and the people in that dream age and evolve as I continue searching for it. With every day that goes by I add another detail and with every detail I make it ever more difficult to find. As I get older I find myself over and over making the wrong choices because no matter how close my dreams seem to be in real life they are never quite that place in my mind's eye. Somehow I have always felt this way my entire life, but I am now 37 years old and those images are more seductive now than ever before.

It is truly like a puzzle. It is the picture on the box that drives and guides me. In the end I expect to have that picture if I can just figure out how to get each piece in the right place. I see my pieces finally assembling in some ways and falling apart in others. I am becoming the physician that I have recently realized that I am in that picture yet it gets harder and harder to see the large empty gaps in my puzzle. I look back at the box over and over for another clue, another detail that might help me find that next piece that fits. As the days go by I wonder more and more if the picture I have in my mind is the right one for the pile of pieces I have been given. I have come so close to such beautiful images and I have lost them because I could not reconcile them with the picture I have in my mind. I tossed the pieces aside and am left with gaps in my picture that won't fill in. When do you begin to question the picture that has sustained you for so long and brought you to this very spot?