When we’re children, dreaming comes naturally.
We imagine places we’ll visit, lives we’ll live, things we’ll create and people we’ll become. We don’t immediately ask whether those dreams are realistic, productive or sensible.
We just imagine.
Somewhere along the way, that changes.
Adulthood has a way of filling our minds with practical things. Work. Money. Responsibilities. Appointments. Plans for next week. Things that need fixing. Things that need finishing.
Without really noticing, What if? slowly becomes What’s realistic?
And maybe we need a little more of the first one.
The Inspiration Behind “Dream On”
Recently, I’ve been experimenting with magazine collage art – cutting apart old magazines and turning completely unrelated images into something new.
There is something wonderfully unpredictable about it.
You don’t begin with an endless library of perfectly coordinated images. You have whatever happens to be printed on those pages.
You search.
You notice things you would normally flip past.
You find a photograph that makes you feel something, even if you can’t quite explain why. You cut it out and save it.
Eventually, little fragments that had absolutely nothing to do with each other begin to tell a story.
For this collage, I wanted that story to be about dreaming.
Not necessarily the enormous, life-changing kind of dreams.
Just the ability to imagine that life could still surprise us.
When Did We Become So Practical?
There is nothing wrong with being realistic. We need plans, responsibilities and some idea of where we’re going.
But I don’t think realism and dreaming have to cancel each other out.
You can appreciate the life you have while imagining something different.
You can be grateful and still want more.
You can have absolutely no idea how something will happen and still allow yourself to wonder what it would feel like if it did.
Not every dream needs to become a goal.
Not every idea needs a five-step plan.
And not everything we imagine needs to be useful.
Sometimes dreaming is simply giving our minds somewhere beautiful to wander.
Creativity Gives Us Permission to Imagine Again
Maybe that’s part of why I’ve been enjoying creative hobbies so much.
When you’re making something, there isn’t always a correct answer.
You can move something because it doesn’t feel right.
You can choose one colour over another simply because you like it.
You can change your mind halfway through.
You can make something strange.
You can make something beautiful.
You can make something that nobody else completely understands.
And none of it needs to accomplish anything.
There is something incredibly freeing about that.
In a world where so much of our time is measured by what we accomplish, creating something simply because we wanted to feels almost rebellious.
Dream On
That’s why I chose these two little words for this collage.
Dream On.
They’re not instructions to quit your job, move across the world or chase some enormous life transformation. They’re much smaller than that. Keep imagining. Keep being curious about what your life could contain. Make the strange thing. Try the hobby you’ve been thinking about. Visit somewhere new. Pick up the book. Take the photograph. Start something even when you’re not particularly good at it yet. And leave a little room in your life for ideas that don’t make perfect sense. Because sometimes the things we dismiss as daydreams are simply possibilities we haven’t figured out yet. And sometimes dreaming doesn’t need to lead anywhere at all. Sometimes it’s enough that, for a moment, it makes the world feel a little bigger.
Dream on.