Dreams
…
I idly ask him what he had been thinking about.
His answer his, “Dreams.”
“Dreams?”
“Yes, but not the ones you have at night; the kind of dreams when you imagine your future, what you hope to come true.”
“And?”
“It’s been occurring to me that they are very important… but I’m not talking about trying to make them into reality: just having them.”
I tilt my head.
“Once you make your dreams into actuality, the dream itself ceases to exist. But if your stay in the world of your dream, your imagination can expand and expand. That’s a characteristic of the dream. If you are always stuck in reality, your thinking doesn’t spread out and grow in the same way.” Then he adds, somewhat poetically, “Because as for reality, there is but one.
“On the other hand, though,” he says, “if you stay in your imagination all the time, soon your dream doesn’t work anymore because dreams need reality as nutrients. Without nutrients, animals and plants die, and if the nourishment for your dreams runs out, the world of the dream gets smaller and smaller and eventually dies. So you need both: dream and reality, imagination and actuality. Thus you have to talk to all kinds of people, look at many kinds of plants, eat all kinds of things to make your imagination new, to keep that interior world fresh. Then your own world can expand and can grow.”
…
A different kind of luxury - Japanese Lessons in Simple Living and Inner Abundance
