How to Transmute Fancy into Hope

Christus natus est! Merry Christmas!

Intro

Since childhood, we have known that the anticipation of a gift is, in a sense, better than the gift itself. The present often carries an aftertaste of disappointment, especially when it fails to meet our expectations.

Adults experience the same thing with their toys – only more intensely. People spend years of their lives and exert enormous effort to attain something, finally reach it – and then complain that they feel only emptiness. The object of desire is in their hands, yet it brings no joy.

Many popular sayings capture this phenomenon, such as “reality never lives up to the dream,” “be careful what you wish for, lest it come true” and so on.

We dream most vividly in adolescence, when we are preparing to enter adult life, making plans and nurturing hopes. For many, this is why their teenage years remain the most vibrant period of their lives, always recalled later with nostalgia.

But youthful dreams either fail to come true – or worse, they do come true and deceive us. As a result, people grow resentful toward the universe as a whole, lose the fire in their eyes, forfeit the ability to dream, and drift through the rest of their lives on autopilot.

This is a sad story, and perhaps the most common one there is.

Can We Avoid This Outcome?

Yes.

Alas, it is impossible to go through life without experiencing some evil. In this sense, we are all fated to exchange childhood innocence for bitter scars. However, this particular burnout of dreams is a solvable problem.

Its root lies in an incorrect understanding of what a dream actually is.

When we speak of longing for attainable goods, this is not, strictly speaking, a dream, but rather a desire, an ambition, an aspiration. For example, “I want to become a CEO” is an ambition. “I want to buy a Lamborghini” is a desire, and so on.

A dream, in the strict sense, is a wish that we harbor but deem unreachable.

Everyday language can be misleading here. When children say, “I dream of becoming a doctor,” they do not mean “I would like to become a doctor, but I know I will never succeed.” What they really mean is: “I want to become a doctor, but for now it is very difficult and very far away.”

By contrast, consider the statement: “I want to become a dragon and soar through the skies.” This is a dream in the proper sense, because it can in no way be fulfilled in present reality. At best, one might approximate it by becoming a pilot or by controlling a dragon in a video game… or by dreaming.

The act of dreaming – that is, the fantasy directed toward the object of the dream – is called daydreaming, fancy, or reverie. It is a compensatory mechanism of the mind, allowing us to partake in a desired good at least in imagination, since it remains inaccessible in reality.

But then a true dream can never disappoint us in the way lesser desires do, precisely because it can never be reached. In this sense, its clear separation from reality works in our favor.

Compass of the Will

So, for the first step of sublimation, we need two things:

• To understand why disappointment over reachable goals is built into our nature.
• To strictly separate possible wishes from impossible ones, and to count as “dreams” only the latter.

Let us examine how the human will operates. It unceasingly seeks a greater and greater good, pushing us to strive for it. When it obtains one, it measures it and declares: “Not bad, but finite. If so, there must exist something greater. Search further.”

This is where this persistent sense of unfulfillment comes from.

People often try to feed their will with more and more earthly goods. Not one yacht, but five complete with helicopters; not one wife, but ten mistresses.

Yet this leads nowhere. No matter how greatly we multiply a finite quantity, the result remains finite. Even if one becomes the sole owner of the entire Earth, this would not bring happiness.

Billions have fallen into this trap, rich and poor, peasants and tyrants alike.

But if we want to avoid it, we must recognize that our will is fundamentally designed in such a way that only a good of infinite magnitude can satisfy it. Nothing less can ever “satiate” us.

And this can be only God. Only He is infinite Goodness in Himself.

This is why our will works this way: it compels us to raise our demands higher and higher, to finally point us toward the Highest One.

In this sense, we have no real choice: only in God can we find ultimate joy and peace – not as a dull stasis, but as a peace replete with the fullness of every possible act.

Thus:

• As long as we act ethically, we are free to pursue any attainable desires, but we should not expect too much from them: nothing can replace God.
• We should not waste effort trying to realize unreachable dreams, but instead freely daydream about them without neglecting the reality.

In so doing, we will never meet disappointment.

Torture of Dreams

Yet this is only the first step. It would be wonderful to “grasp” an infinite good, but in our mortal life God remains rather distant. It seems that He, along with all other unattainable goods, belongs to the category of dreams, and we can only contemplate Him in fancy.

But reveries torment the heart without much gain. Fantasies about the impossible do not make it possible; they only aggravate our metaphysical wound.

This is why “down-to-earth” people treat dreams with neglect: to them, they are a waste of time, when one could be doing something useful instead.

Often it is parents who deliver such lectures to their children about “returning to reality,” which in any era irritate children to no end. Still, their words, though crude, seem to contain a measure of truth.

There is an opposite approach, a kinder one. It says: yes, you should harbor an unreachable dream. Let it be your guiding star and driving force. You may never reach it, but on your way toward it you will perform many good, even great, deeds.

This may or may not work depending on the person. But I must point out that this approach, though noble, has an inner weakness as well. If a dream is a true one, i.e. absolutely impossible, it may never provide any strength to move toward it.

Let us take the dragon-dreamer again: yes, he might construct some kind of virtual fantasy reality to grasp his goal. But after flying within it, he will inevitably say “that’s just not it”. For, again, whatever is attainable always carries an element of frustration.

And if he realizes this from the very beginning, he may refuse to work toward anything at all.

Final Sublimation

How should we handle dreams, then? We do not want to discard them and grow callous at heart, but neither do we want them to torment us fruitlessly.

The answer is again found in God. God is almighty; for Him, anything is possible. That means everything is possible for a Christian as well – in the joyful eternity that He wishes to grant us.

To assume the physical form of a dragon there? Why not, as a symbol of freedom and majesty. In God’s dictionary, there is no word “unreachable.”

Thus, for Christians, any dream is obtainable. But then, by definition, it can no longer be strictly called a “dream.” For a desire that strives toward a bonum arduum – a difficult, distant, yet possible good – there exists another word: hope.

From this comes a slightly mind-bending conclusion: Christians should possess no dreams. However, not because dreams are “stupid” or “sinful,” but because every one of them is essentially not a dream at all, but a hope.

As long as we place our trust in God and in His goodness, we can be assured that all our wishes that are futile here will be fulfilled there.

This brings us a measure of inner peace even now, yet simultaneously awakens a longing for Heaven, for our true and yet unknown home. But such longing is sacred.

And it completely resolves the problem of “idling daydreams.” Now, we can stretch every impulse of dream toward God and lay it into His hands.

Summary

Such a strategy allows us to reap the best of both worlds. We can live our lives pursuing the goods we need without becoming disappointed in them. At the same time, we need not forfeit our dreams and turn into yet another burnt-out adult. We can receive from our reveries not emptiness, but hope.

Everything falls into place when God assumes His rightful place at the center of the soul.

May Almighty God grant us the strength to always place our hopes in Him, so that through this we may ultimately reach His transfigured world, where all things will be replete with truth. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.