Memoria in aeterna

Is the price of living a dream greater than the price of living without venturing to dream?

The dreams have always been part of people's lives, from ancient Greece, where Pythias interpreted them, to the more recent theories that express the neurological phenomena. Also we can find innumerous definitions to the word DREAM. Ranging from the merely scientific angle where it is seen as a series of psychic phenomena that occur involuntarily during our sleep to more religious ones that includes the sincerely manner of which God could communicate to the prophets, state of partial emancipation of the soul, occasion where our perceptions would be sharpened, and several others.

But one thing is universally known about dreams: the fiction, or that other reality if you prefer invented by us, humans, using our lived experiences mingled with the leaven of our unfulfilled desires and imagination, has joined us as our guardian angels since the depths of prehistory, what began as a winding road, after millennia, would take us to the stars, to dominate the atoms and other several prodigious achievements in the domain of knowledge, lead us to discovery of human rights, freedom, but also the destructive brutality, shown the way to better understand the same desires and sentiments that help create it, it created the SOVEREIGN INDIVIDUAL. Dreams were the corner stone of our civilization.

Dreams were the fundamental paradigm revolutionized in idea of the civilization’s birth, or dawn of the civilization, and are deeply identified with a common ceremony that took place in a deep cave or in the clearing of a forest where we see humans, squatting or sitting, around a campfire which helps them repel insects and so called evil spirits, men and women of the tribe, attentive, absorbed, suspended to a state that would not be a exaggeration to call religious trance, kind of a daydream, of the words they hear coming from the mouth of a man or woman who would be fair, though nor sufficient, to call it witch, shaman, healer, because although it would be considered to be one, he is someone that also DREAMS and communicates their DREAMS to others, making the entire tribe to DREAM in a unison with him, after all he is a storyteller.

And the man and woman who are there, while, witched by what they hear, let their imaginations run wild, flying out of their precarious and simple existences into another life – a life of lies, not common or ordinary lies, but truly lies, which they build in a silent complicity with the man or woman who, at the center of the scenario, tells fables out loud – performing, without warns, the more exclusively human endeavor, the one which more genuinely and exclusively defines the human nature, that it is yet in formation: The possibility of living their common place lives to live for a couple of minutes or hours a substitute for the “real” reality, that they do not choose, the one that is fatally imposed by any given reason at birth and random circumstances of the so called life, a life that sooner or later feels like an easement or a prison from which we wish to escape. Those who are there, listening to the storyteller, lulled by new images that his words poured over them, as before, in solitude or privacy, were perpetrated, by minutes or burst, this live exorcism and abjurations of the real life, by fantasizing and DREAMing.

And this complex procedure of turning that into a collective activity, a social event, institutionalized into the tribe life, is a momentous step in the process of humanization of the primitive, is the start of their spiritual life, the birth of culture, of the long road into civilization, and the most important feature that has its ignition in this moment is our: MEMORY. A common memory to our whole kind, a collective DREAM that we can share, use, add and modify in a single movement where every aspect of the civilization is changed by the slightest modification in our perception of life.

DREAMS while helping us to face our fears and desires, made us more resilient and ambitious, also gave a transcendent meaning to our freedom by giving birth to a wish to live differently from what common day circumstances forced us. Therefore, although the millennial passage of human events have obliged us to strip of many things – prejudices, taboos, fears, habits, beliefs, Gods and demons – which were important obstacles in order to reach new heights of progress and civilization, we remained faithful to this particular ancient rite.

It was, and is, the most powerful tool that allows us to escape our fears and frustrations, helps fulfill our desires, outwit old age and overcome death, live the love that was over, and the mercy of our enemies and lost friends; it was, and it always will be the cruelty and excesses that we call angels and demons that live within our cores, and thus multiplying the possibilities of our lives in the crackling heat of the fire of that other life, impalpable, witched and essential that we call DREAMS.

Living the DREAM or abandoning it probably costs the same, usually a very expensive price. But the first act leads us to commune with the miracle of life, and the second is not useful for anything.

But no matter what you choose, be sure to enjoy every single second of it… After all DREAMS are, by definition, cursed with a short life…




"Dreams are the touchstones of our character." - Henry David Thoreau & "All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible." - T. E. Lawrence




Listening to "Brothers in Arms" - Dire Straits