Dreams water the tree of life

Do not deceive yourselves by chasing the ghosts inside the kingdom of despair and pessimism, and do not waste your time and energy playing imaginative games and running behind the void.

Life is a dream, and our dreams are what determine the kind of life we will live and the kind of future we will build.

Paulo Coelho, the famous Brazilian writer, wrote in The Pilgrimage that “we must never stop dreaming. Dreams provide nourishment for the soul, just as a meal does for the body. Many times in our lives we see our dreams shattered and our desires frustrated, but we have to continue dreaming. If we don't our soul dies". What a tragedy to live a soulless life and a meaningless existence. Dreams are the power that motivates us to face the challenges and to fly in the open horizons of success, prosperity and fame.

Without them, the world is but a prison where our talents, skills and potentials are shackled, and a cage where our wings break and where we live as prisoner of the self and of the others.

Without dreams, our life is but a cemetery where we are burying ourselves without knowing, and a tomb we dig with our hands and minds knowingly or unknowingly. I often feel sad when I see our students who have spent more than ten years inside schools without having clear dreams in mind, and who have not yet decided what they want to be and what they are living for.

This is a bitter reality; most of our pupils find it hard to talk in public about their dreams. The answer we usually get when asking them, "what do you want to be in the future?” is, "I don't know".

We are not taught to talk about our dreams and because of this some people think that it is a bad thing to dream, or that dreaming is consistent with being weak, and feminine. ‘Only girls dream’, some people say.

On the contrary, the worst disease that ruins ourselves and our energies is the fact that we do not dream and we do not dream the big dreams.

It is a shame not to know your goals and dreams in life. It is a crime against yourself and your community not to know where the trains of study and life are taking you to and in what direction and destination are you heading to.

When we avoid talking about our dreams, we stop watering the flowers and the roots of our life. The grass of hope gets dry, the leaves of hope and aspirations fall one after one, and the flowers of values and humanity withers.

“When we renounce our dreams and find peace, we go through a short period of tranquility. But the dead dreams begin to rot within and infect our entire being. We become cruel to those around us, and then we begin to direct this cruelty against ourselves. That’s when illnesses and psychoses arise’, Paulo Coelho says.

Thus, dreaming, and only dreaming is the best way to cure our hearts and mind, to change our vision of the world, to avoid mental and psychic illnesses and to live free, independent and happy.

Parents and teachers should teach their kids to dream and to talk about their dreams and think about them. Without dreams we are dead, rotting and meaningless.

’You may say I am a dream,

But I am not the only one,

I hope one day you’ll join us

And the world will be as one”

Edited by Allison Kraemer