Dreamers

From fetus to 21st birthday, umbilical chord to college room and board, we’re 

dependent on the authority figure. Never dismissing the parent’s kissing on the 

forehead before you go to bed but always accepting the illusion that an adult will be 

there to read you a bedtime story. But the adult realizes the inevitable, and straight 

out of diapers? We are taught to read the story ourselves – to even become writers 

and design our own stories to read to our own children. But behind the innocence of

the phrase “sweet dreams” is the foreboding storm cloud outside the windowsill. 

That from this point on, the faith in the colorful pictures and fairytale protagonists 

that emphasize good will will go down hill.

They say that we have free will, as if all the pennies thrown into the well and all the meteors that shot across the sky will allow me to wake up to all those wonderful dreams that I dreamt years ago become reality. But the fallacy is that there’s a savage wilderness outside the sanctuary of 

my bedroom – a world where nothing’s like my childhood picture books where the 

good guys always win, but more like my biology book where animals paw and claw 

to save their own skins. But outside the classroom, that’s exactly how things are: an 

endless cycle of victimizing the victims where ambitions are torn down without a 

scratch, but still a scar. But we are not savages. So why do we act as if Darwin is 

pulling the strings?

They say only the strongest survive, but I saw it’s the dreamers 

who thrive because they’ve got their head in the clouds. And that’s the place to be. 

Because down below is a world that claims potential is the key, but potential is too 

much a measure of how well you fit the script instead of improvise the role, but who 

needs a critic if you left your heart on that stage? So I’ll use these bones that my 

parents gave me and the mind that they raised to become the writer of my own 

story, the director of my play. With the world as my stage, I’ll rise up above the 

people that try to tear me down. And whether I’m about to jump out of bed or trying 

to count sheep, I’ll be my own falling star and see my own dreams become reality 

both while I wake and as I sleep.