We live, while we see the sun,
Where life and dreams are as one;
And living has taught me this,
Man dreams the life that is his,
Until his living is done.

Segismundo’s monologue in Life is a Dream by Calderon de la Barca explores the belief that we live in some kind of virtual reality state. The same concept was presented in The Matrix movies. We are living in one state dreaming the state we think we are living. It sounds like Inception too: a dream within a dream, within a dream. Flash back to Alice in Wonderland as well. Reverie is a dream state, but it doesn’t have to bring only ethereal consequences. You have the capacity through symbolic interpretation to dream wide awake and achieve earthly results.

 A similar take is presented in Animal Dreams, a book by Barbara Kingsolver. The dog is sleeping and making sudden movements while apparently dreaming. Curiosity leads to infer in what is the dog dreaming about. According to the characters in the book, the dog dreams about the things he did that day. If we as humans dream about only the things we did that day we are no different. We would only have animal dreams.

Erwin Raphael McManus brings the other side of the coin to exploration in the book Wide Awake. McManus described the potential we all have to turn our lives in an adventure in which we live our dreams and see them as goals and motivators to thrive. We can dream with our eyes open. We can use our God-given talents and imagination to create a future in which we can give purpose to our existence.

Maybe our dreams are also given by God. The story of Joseph shows that no matter how bad things look now, those dreams we had are yet to pass. We are not only dreaming about the past but also about the future. He went to a lot of difficult situations but was faithful and his dreams came alive. There is a plan in a future we are yet to discover in which we fit and participate actively turning our lives in an adventure.

Never stop dreaming. Living in a dream state is not a bad thing. Certainly, we all need to sleep and it is possible that we dream in our sleep. However, dreaming wide awake create life, beauty, and change. Art, music, architecture, technology innovations, inventions that facilitate our daily endeavors, all of it is a product of the imagination of some who refused to stop dreaming.