Merchant of dreams

Do you remember the last time you played pretend? When was the last time you were a princess or a ninja or a spy or a pirate or a pop star in your head? I guess you could say those are silly questions to ask anyone who considers themselves not to be a child anymore. That then begs me to question why the questions seem silly. Playing pretend is one of the earliest skills we acquire growing up. The art of putting on a lens to shape one's reality to however they it seems fit to do so. A lot of it is based on the things that one has previously seen or experienced, which is how a toddler can play kitchen based on their observations of a parent cooking in the kitchen. As time goes by, and more and more information is acquired, one starts to extrapolate the information. You start to go beyond what you usually see in the kitchen, what if you were stacking pancakes all the way to the moon or how would you act if you were in a cooking show?

If I am not being too presumptuous in my understanding, it would not be too far fetched to say that an infant pretending, that their mud pies are actually chocolate  is akin to a thought experiment. Some data from the real world is collected, in a case where this could be the fact that chocolate and mud are of similar complexion, then because of that commonality in appearance one could be substituted for the other. It is sort of like alchemy, bringing things which are not, into existence in the laboratory of one's mind. There is so much information we take in as we go through life, that could be synthesized in our heads to come up with new possibilities. 

A lot of the things we learn are actually just derivatives of a first experience that we have. The first time you had ice-cream, you figured out that it was cold, sweet and depending on the weather, refreshing. The flavor of the ice-cream gets tampered with and sprinkles are added on top, which makes it sweeter. Similar dairy products are frozen too, and you get frozen yogurt, in stead of a cone use a waffle. I have not even exhausted the combinations that are possible while having ice-cream as the starting point. If we kept on questioning and wondering and pushing past the norm, who knows what delightful discoveries we would make. 

It is okay to get a little lost in your head at times because that's where we find out interesting things about ourselves. A point of importance, is that there is a need for realizing what is real and that which is ideal are different. This a disappointing fact for the dreamer and can even lead one to cynicism. Dreams will not always actualize into something more. That should not discourage one from creatively thinking and looking at the surroundings around them. The different visions of what we want to achieve at times spur us on, like a mirage in a dessert reminding a traveler of what a pool of water looks like. This keeps us wanting to move onward to find the refreshing water source of our dreams, and not to be satisfied with the dry mundane things of everyday life.  

This ambition should be kept in check and not turn into an all consuming avarice. The beauty of the dichotomy between dreams and reality is that they compliment each other whilst being vastly dissimilar. Reality means that you can physically experience the world around you, physiologically you can take record of the things that are going on. That which is not ideal is flawed, these flaws leave room for innovation. Handling problematic people and situations helps train one to grow in virtues like patience,perseverance, kindness and empathy, to name a few. Simultaneously, life is not just made of the things we can physically acknowledge. God gave us the gift of intellect to ponder, to meditate, to be imaginative and navigate the trails that we can trek in our minds. So here's my license for you to daydream, who knows where it may lead you, I know that this whole blog started as a silly dream and look where that got us.