TONIGHT

Tonight a dream is wind for your sails. In a raging storm, sanctuary.

Tonight a dream is a bone stuck in your throat. Insistent irritant, you choke on it with every breath.

Tonight a dream is sand in your eye. You blink hard, your eye smarts. Tears stream down your cheeks. But the sand clings on, abrasive against the raw insides of your eyelids.

Tonight your dream is soothing breeze, sublime peace. A star, brighter than a thousand suns.

Tonight your dream is a tornado of terror that drowns your bravest impulse.

Tonight your dream is a bed of roses, a lush red carpet unraveling at your feet.

Tonight your dream is shattered glass, bare feet on broken glass, you bleed.

Tonight your dream is life breath, heart beat, steady pulse.

Tonight it is glinting knife blade at your heart. Crushing you with its burdens of hope, expectation, failure, disappointment.

Two fates hover over every dream's head. As the karmic dice rolls and you reach the crossroads, your dream can soar and fly, and turn into reality. Live the dream: the gods declare. Happy end, sweet delight…

Or the wind blows the other way. With tattered sails, your dream crashes into jagged rocks. Bitter end, a wreck in its wake. Too late like Icarus, you realize you flew too close to the sun. Soaring ambition has melted the wax of your dream. No feathers left to propel your flight, you sink like a stone, all the way down into the cold heart of the sea. No sky left to scale. Your tomb, the ocean's womb.

The Greeks, as always, hit the mythical nail right on the head. Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams, is pictured as a "being lying on an ebony bed in a dim-lit cave surrounded by poppies." He can change shape as he wishes. When he appears in the dreams of mortals, he takes on human form. Morphine, which has a certain reputation for triggering mind games, is named after none other than this Greek god.

The shape of a dream is always in flux. Like a cloud, it floats on your mindscape, changing form and scope with each new dawn. Chasing a dream is like chasing air, or a cloud or a whiff of smoke. It has no solid contours that you can hold up as proof to a disbelieving world. It exists, but only within the confines of the dreamer's head. You cannot spell it out in words. You cannot convince the world of its validity by drawing a pie chart or giving a power point presentation.

So the world treats dreamers with a mix of scorn and skepticism.

A dream will ask you to walk roads that have never been tread. It will demand you to make impossible sacrifices. To take leaps of faith which do not hold out any assurance of success. The dreamer's course makes no sense to those whose thoughts are imprisoned in a straight jacket.

For example. I walked into an editor's room to give him the news that I am abandoning my full time job to work on my first novel.

In response, I get a look of profound disbelief.

So, I explain the whole deal again, careful not to use words of more than three syllables, lest it befuddle the already befuddled eminence.

"So, you are saying you want to take time off from work to write your…hm…novel?"

"Wow," I think. Finally, the message has been decoded. A triumph of human communication.

"Yes. Yes." I nod encouragingly.

"You could take time off if you were sick. Or hospitalized. Or…" A considered pause… "Or pregnant."

"Huh?" I am stumped. I have no life threatening illness. Nothing that needs hospitalization. Or emergency medical care. I am not pregnant, not as far as I know.

"Like I said, I want to work on my novel," I mutter, kicking myself for having started this conversation in the first place. Would have been far simpler to walk out of the door.

"Yeah, you could take time off from work. If you were sick, or hospitalized…." Here comes the response again like a pre-recorded message.

I could have tried explaining the whole story. This time in Greek or Gallic. Maybe Mandarin or some ancient Mayan dialect? Urdu, Sanskrit, Norwegian, Russian? No. Whatever language I took refuge in would have led us to the same cul-de-sac. Obviously, the language wasn't the hurdle that blocked our path.

The lover, the dreamer and the lunatic are in the same boat. You are chasing an abstraction that shines like a beacon before your eyes. But as far as the world is concerned, you are simply a fool, stumbling in the dark.

But when the dream turns real, the world rushes in where it had feared to tread. Soon as a dream finds success, the world sits up and takes notice. Gone are the whispered asides about the dreamer's sanity. Scepticism is flung out of the window, the celebrations begin.

Marie Curie, Jane Goodall, Charles Durning – some celebrated success stories. Madam Curie's family went bankrupt when she a teenager. Though trapped in abject poverty, she managed to keep her dream alive. She doggedly pursued her passion for science and went on to complete her higher studies in spite of the hurdles.

When Goodall took off to East Africa in the summer of 1960 to study the chimpanzee population, it was considered an 'odd' if not outright absurd step for a woman primatologist. But an unfazed Goodall, whose research changed the very fundamentals of primatology, was determined to follow her childhood dream.

Charles Durning, who won the 2008 Screen Actor's Guild Award for Life Time Achievement in acting, kept his Hollywood dream alive in spite of a series of heart breaking rejections. As a youngster, when he applied to the American Academy of Dramatic Art, he was asked to stop wasting their time as he had "no talent." When he auditioned for film roles as a beginner, he was rudely rejected by directors. Durning clung to his dream and refused to be browbeaten. Then came a role in a hit Broadway play in 1972, followed by a meaty part in the Oscar winner "The Sting." His dream took wing…And the rest is screen history.

The ones who made it are well remembered.

The ones who didn't, are easily forgotten.

But in the end, what the world chooses to remember or forget is immaterial. What matters is whether you took the leap. And flied as close to the sun as you wished.

So tonight, follow the road your dream dictates.