D is for Dare to Dream

June 12, 2025

“Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.”

~Eugene Ionesco

Have you had dreams that have guided you in your life, beckoned you to go down a particular path, to take a risk that might enrich your life? Not just the kind of dreams you have when you sleep, but also the ones that flicker in and out of your imagining mind, that kind of haunt you in a good way. What if I…? If only I… I would really love to…

I have had those good kinds of dreams. Some were fulfilled with hard work and support from lots of people. Others went underground for years or decades, only to pop up again in my “late middle age” years.

I recently remembered that when I was in fifth grade, Mrs. Griggs’ class at Glendover Elementary, I wanted to be a writer more than anything. For Christmas that year, Santa brought me a real typewriter on which I wrote a science fiction story about a group of kids on another planet. The main characters were my classmates who sat around me! Writing today is for pleasure and to find out what I think - not necessarily skilled, but thoroughly enjoy it.

Writing about dreams … It has been hard to write the last several days because of what is happening out in California and in other parts of the country. The dreams of hundreds, thousands of people are being crushed under the boots of strongmen. The dreams of working and providing for your family, of seeing your children thrive in school and move through grades up to graduation; dreams of being part of a vibrant community, living with many people who share your culture and many who don’t; dreams of eventually becoming an American citizen. I am watching, day after day, as people are ripped from their families, homes, schools, neighborhoods, and jobs at the whim of our president and those around him who are indiscriminate in their hatred of people who aren’t white. I don’t know what is driving the cruelty of the president and his crew – greed, lust for power, incompetence, sociopathy – but does it even matter at this point?

I am encouraged that our citizenry is responding to this crisis with largely peaceful protests across the country, from big metropolitan “blue-state” areas to small rural “red-state” areas. I will be out there on Saturday here in Pittsburgh – lots going on – with friends who want only to preserve our basic freedoms and to protect those who are being treated so cruelly.

What does a nation do when its foundational dreams are squelched – dreams of a fair and just society where people can thrive regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual or gender identity, religion, economic class?

I recently read about something called “hypernormalization.” Hypernormalization describes how people eventually respond when all rights have been stripped away because of authoritarian or tyrannical governments. Scholars have studied this in Soviet Russia and in other places, and are now turning their focus, which is so sad and hard to believe, on the US.

There are a couple of stages of hypernormalization: First, people see and know in their guts that governing systems and institutions are broken. Second, at the same time, people act as though everything is normal in spite of things obviously falling apart - they buy into what the authoritarian leaders are telling them. The cost to the attempts to normalize what is happening, however, include fear, dread, denial, and dissociation.

This describes what things sometimes feel like to me. I go about my daily life, taking care of the home, taking pictures, exercising, spending time with family and friends. Then - BAM - I see photos of starving children in Gaza and read about what the withdrawal of USAID funds is doing to the well-being of adults and kids in Africa. I see police officers on horseback in LA hitting protesters with big sticks when there seems to have been no provocation. It feels so disorienting and distressing.

What incongruity we are experiencing! It is so hard moving back and forth between the "normal" and the "awful." It makes sense that we feel disoriented as government spokespersons try to make it sound like all is as it should be and we are the problem.

It is not your imagination nor a sign of weakness if these experiences make you feel like screaming or crawling back into bed with the covers over your head. It is so damn heart-breaking and confusing.

I know that I have enough privilege in my life that I can often go along as I always have. But I won’t. I believe that I must pay attention to both the normal and the awful - I want to be part of a solution. But I also think that, even when we refuse to turn away from what is happening and when we commit to doing something to make things better, there are costs to living in this crazy yo-yo land.

I watched part of a documentary about hypernormalization that focused primarily on the Soviet Union. In one scene, a reporter describes how, in the Soviet Union, a fake society began to emerge as people began to pretend that everything was normal – even as they knew that the government was lying to them about everything being normal. The Soviet Union became a place where no one believed in anything or had a vision, a dream, for the future.

Later in the film, another reporter interviewed a Soviet woman as she was working around her house. He asked, “If you had a wish, what would it be?” “Huh? What?” “A wish, a dream – what would it be?”

Her responses – “What can I say? I wouldn’t even know what to tell you… I don’t wish for anything. I don’t have any dreams. Even if I did, they wouldn’t come true. I won’t think about it anymore, and I won’t dream again.”

Wow. I don’t think we are there yet. Still, I know that learned helplessness can come when your repeated efforts to control negative events around you bear no fruit. You eventually give up. Nothing matters. No dreams or wishes for anything better.

Several years ago, I think during Trump’s first term, I participated in a retreat related to Joanna Macy’s "The Work That Reconnect" - work that helps us take part in the healing of our world.

Retreat participants included people from a variety of professional backgrounds, from young adult to old, who were dedicated to healing the negative impacts of climate change, environmental destruction, and our disconnection from Nature.

These were people with big dreams, people who had dared to take steps every day to fulfill those dreams. They wanted to make the world a better place. And many were burned out.

One of the exercises that we did required that all of us use our imagination in an interesting way. As I remember it – we were paired up for this exercise. One of us played the role of a young person who was living seven generations from now, well into the future. This person interviewed the other person, an older person who had lived through a great unraveling of institutions and nature and social supports, then through the transition into a more humane and sustainable society.

The young person was to ask the older one such questions as – How did you all do it? What decisions did you make, and how did you make those decisions? What was it like? How did it feel to you while it was going on? How did you get from that awful place to this good place?

I played the older person. As the interview began, I started to cry, which really confused me. I realized that I did not believe that we would ever make it to this better world. I grieved for my dreams of healing and justice that might never be fulfilled – I just could not imagine, based on how things were going at the time in the larger world, that we were going to make it.

But I persisted – there must be something that I can learn from this, I thought. I made myself dream, imagine what that wonderful world would look like, and then backed up from there to imagine people working together to get there.

Guess what I realized? In our little imaginary world, this scenario, the saving grace was that PEOPLE WORKED TOGETHER. Across different needs and causes, practicing solidarity to support one another. AND…. And they celebrated. Every step of the way, every tiny success and even the setbacks. Even the setbacks. They celebrated together.

I am watching the LA protesters sing and dance and celebrate even as rubber bullets target them, flash grenades explode, tear gas erupts. They sing and dance and celebrate with maximum joy. Through pain and anguish, they are doing whatever they can to keep their dreams alive.

Could we? Shall we? Yes, let’s.

Photo: "A Joyful Transformation"

Taken in North Park, Pittsburgh PA, July 2024