essay reverie
to try as dream, to dream as being
I like the word essay because it means to try and I think that’s a friendly way to be for a word. To hold the enoughness of try/play/explore as the whole of it all, the purpose of what we create with words and what words create with us.
I like the word reverie because it’s beautiful to say and I love how the soft-lift-whisp of it brings us somewhere we couldn’t go alone. How it holds us in a drift of dream-form and invites us to stretch beyond this, too.
I’ve been learning how to dream again. Not like how the definitions say, but from a remembering of where dreams live, how they play, what they know.
It’s not that the definitions of dream (or reverie) are wrong, it’s that they’re incomplete. Definitions are at best only ever fragments, glimpses of what someone saw from where they were in a moment. Most dream definitional fragments have become cliché, easily dismissed to realms of make-believe, or relegated to lofty aspiration and idea-based mantras.
Do you know the elephant parable? It’s like that. We walk around thinking we understand the whole of dream, yet we barely let ourselves see one toenail on one foot.
There is an expanse of reverie that’s pulling me in, showing me what’s possible at this present time—guiding me to see what’s needed now and what reverie needs from us. And although I, too, can only see what I can see from where I am now, and this is, too, only a glimpse, what I can see (and sense) is oceans beyond what the definitions say of dream.
Reverie is emergence—lift of soul, outstretched, free. Going-into and coming-from, all at once. Not space of time. Nothing of effort. It’s not about holding on. You have to let go.
It’s not the stuff of the mind. We receive and play and love through dream, as dream. It offers itself from the whole of who we are. The whole of dream is the whole of you, of me, of us.
You don’t see or follow it like you might a sign or goal. Dream finds you. And you find yourself somewhere beyond where you thought it possible to know.
This is why the whales are here. The bats and spiders, too. You can ask them. (It’s not a secret.)
Reverie is the aliveness of everything and the awe of it all. It’s the energy of transformation, and it wants us to sculpt with it—create, sing, dance, kiss, hug, share, listen, rest, cook, grow, build, see, resee, learn, unlearn. Play as dream. Connect as dream. Love as dream.
Reverie is practice. Not practice in preparation for something later. Not trying to be something or somewhere else. We dream now to be dream now.
Dream is the message we give our hearts through each breath. We live dream into being through our being. This is the essay. The trying dream. Essay reverie. This is the whole of it.
It’s a different kind of trying. It’s not what we’ve been told. So, we unlearn it as we go. We show up as reverie to practice reverie and allow ourselves to be enveloped in the grace of our play—mixing of metaphor, detangling of old and tussled thoughts, freedom of falling, delight of shifting views, the bountiful listening and receiving of it all.
This can only feel unreachable (lofty, far-away, impossible) if you separate from it, if you decide to hold tight to the definitional fragments that say dream is outside of you. When you stay in reverie, you are grounded and present in 3D life and work as the potentiality of reverie.
How does this translate to children? Children need no translation. They already know this. We must only get out of their way (and allow/design for their expansive creativity and full expressions). And we must listen to what they have to teach us. Reverie reveals itself to us through children.
How do we live this ourselves? We must get out of our own way, too. The play and awe of reverie is inside us. We must allow it space to be, to become. We loosen control. We let go of fixed ideas. We open our hearts. We let ourselves be.
This essay emerged as reverie. As the words unfolded, I unfolded, too, and was returned to one of my dream homes: The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard (my favorite book). I went to my shelf to hold the book, to look for where he wrote of reverie. I played a bit inside his musings of nests, corners, and miniature, but couldn’t find mention of reverie. And then I remembered his other books on another shelf. There I found it: The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos. I hadn’t looked at this book in at least a decade. I held it in my hands and saw myself (in Cape Town) when I read it in 2009 (I always date my books). And I cried. In awe. In gratitude of becoming. Bachelard’s words have always felt like a coming home to me, a finding of myself in what I already know but can’t quite see. An emerging from and emerging into at the same time.
And this is how it happens to live as essay, essay as reverie. To be given miracle upon miracle simply through a practice of seeing what’s always already here.
So it is.
love+light, Melissa
A photo from the fjords of Bergen, Norway (June 2022)
A few dream definitional fragments (and their old assumptions):
To achieve a dream (as if the value is only in service of an outcome)
Fanciful, abstracted musings (as if impractical and not useful)
Believe in a dream (as if dreams are ideas)
Illusion of dream (as if dreams aren’t real forms)
Don’t give up on your dreams (as if dreaming is something of individual effort)
Lost in reverie (as if being lost, surrendering, or not-knowing is a problem)
Preoccupation with something to the exclusion of all else (as if “preoccupation” isn’t always a matter of where we choose to put our attention)
Loose, irregular train of thought (as if regular, measured, linear thinking is ideal)
We dream now to be dream now.
Waterfall near Flam Railway, Flam, Norway (June 2022)
Reverie is the essay.
The trying dream.
This is the whole of it.
I can support you to see more reverie in what you do, how you do it, and guide you towards more dream congruence with your why.
