A Love Letter To Dreaming
“This is the precarious balance of a thriving society: exposing the fissures and fractures of democracy, but then, rather than letting them gape into abysses of cynicism, sealing them with the magma of lucid idealism that names the alternatives and, in naming them, equips the entire supercontinent of culture with a cartography of action.” — Maria Popova
This is my love letter to dreaming. I chose to write it at what I believe is the perfect time. It moors me down to the current moment were all living through, and reminds me of the power of dreaming during moments like this. Granted, before I begin I want to set the record straight on the use of the word “moment” and the baggage that it comes with.
When we say moment we are confining our experiences to a brief period of time. Something temporary, transient, and soon to pass. More, when we use the language that speaks to a certain type of independence we almost separate our actions from that of their influences in the past. We run the risk of erasing the work that many activist and artist and organizers have been doing for a number of years that got us here. This is, by no means, a moment all it’s own. It is the product of some many intersecting lines of work and efforts over the years by so many people, known and unknown. So many who have achieved so many wonderful things, and we rest and work off of their efforts and achievement. Instead of a moment as a singular thing, we are more in a new iteration of a consistent cycle that further recognizes the democratic experience. It is not singular and is not necessarily new, but, for clarity’s sake I will continue to use the word moment in this letter.
I chose to call this a love letter to dreaming, partially out of hope. Through the explanation I hope that I can articulate, in some way, what exactly I am loving and why. What exactly is the dreaming that I love and why did I write a love letter to it. We don’t often talk about the importance of love in dreaming and imagination but it’s something that’s overlooked and needs to be included more often if were to achieve any type of radical change. As we shift in this moment we have to begin to expand our dreaming to include others. We also have to avoid the easy generalizations of others, and to do this, especially in regards to dreaming collectively, it has to be done with love.
For us to make a better future, we have to be able to see it and envision it, or better yet, we have to be able dream it. For us to be able to dream it, we have to know what things dreamt in the past came to fruition. To do this, we have to balance the effort of engaging history on one hand, and dreaming up a future on the other. This means that we’re called to re-define what exactly dreaming means and is. It is not solely a gaze directed to the future, it is also an understanding and consistent investment in our past. These are two inseparable ideas that come together to define what dreaming should be seen as today.
Once we begin to truly dive into our history, we are reminded that it is filled primarily with communities, not just just people. Communities that we may not know intimately but are still accountable for and to. This is a radical shift in direction that we aren’t use to, the American imagination often portrays a philosophy of individual exceptionalism as the benchmark of success. The history books are littered with names of agents divorced from their communities and elevated to near-divine heights, yet these are false narratives. Our salvation for the future lies not in the idea of a solitary individual elevated to leadership, but instead in the collective that nourishes one another and is filled with love and agency. The contemporary dream is through our collectives, and thus collective power. Both looking forward as to what those collectives can be, as well as looking back and recognizing the communities that supported our most radical change agents is what constitutes a critical dream.
To understand and embolden this form of dreaming I choose to look through the collective lens of cities. Historically, cities have been the locust for collective dreaming, but with an obvious caveat. Most often the city is understood through the lens of one group of people, or worse, the business owners of the largest corporations in that city. In a sense the city might dream collectively, but it has never furnished dreams that have been inclusive and diverse. If we look at Charlotte specifically the idea of the individual dream has reigned supreme ever since the creation of suburbs and the wide roads that lend themselves to automobiles and productivity. This served only the CEOs who needed their workers to get to work as fast as possible, and the workers who were pursuing and sometimes existed in the American Dream. Now, more than ever we have a chance to shift the way things work, but for that to happen we have to shift how we dream at the foundational level.
This larger idea of city dreaming is understandably terrifying at first. It’s no surprise that often we don’t feel as if we have the power to affect real change. We feel too small, and sometimes that perceived smallness is what keeps us insular and unconcerned about the way the city changes. Yet, when we dream with others and find the others who too are dreaming collectively were reminded of our power and responsibilities as citizens.
Anyone whose been in Charlotte long enough knows that we get our logo and our team name from General Cornwallis’s statement about Mecklenburg county when he came through momentarily before the American Revolution. He was greeted with massive hostility and is quoted as saying “the counties of Mecklenburg and Roban [Rowan]…were more hostile to England than any in America” and said Mecklenburg specifically “is a hornet’s nest of insurrection”. True to our namesake I dream that Charlotte keeps it’s rebellious roots, but instead of against an oppressive force overseas, we focus squarely on oppressive and antiquated systems in place here within our own city limits. Our local forms of resistance, our local forms of rebellion, and above all, our local forms of dreaming are evidenced through a number of groups and organizations that I have celebrated in the essay that follows this one.
I love dreaming. I’ve always been a person who drifts into lands of make-believe. I’ve spent more time in and with my imagination than I have working, even when I’m supposed to be working. But, the idea that dreaming has no foundation in the real world is false belief that needs to be done away with. More, It’s a false belief that is subversively useful for erasure when our past is full of trauma, harm and abuse that many would like us to just forget. It’s impossible to forget these transgressions when they are being recycled and perpetuated today. It’s important to remember that dreaming requires a faithful recognition of history and intimacy with it to be able to radically dream new ways of being. I wanted to say “Now, more than ever”, but I think that type of language adheres to the same presentism bias that the idea of a moment does. While we dream up new ways of living, we are also dreaming up new ways of dreaming, and those new ways are fully accountable to our past. I hope that through this essay I was able to assist you in your own form of radical dreaming.
