The title of this blog is of course borrowed. And I am hardly taking on the magnanimous task attempting an actual study of our dreams and the sub-concious mind as Freud did. What I am trying here is to to understand how our dreams, our hidden and obvious desires and wants, our instinctual and learned urges, our appetites, our connection to our primal needs - how does it all affect what we actually end up getting in life, what effect they have on the choices that we make in life and how in light of those decisions do we later on look back at our actions?
When we are younger we all are very confident as to knowing what we want out of our lives. Or, we think we are sure as to what we want. Be it a successful career, a good and fulfilling relationship with a significant other, or a family - we assume that we have charted our needs for the remaining part of our lives and as we accomplish the defined milestones, or get what we think we want life will progress accordingly and all will be good.
Is it that simple? Like most things, it isn't. As we grow older, as we live out the life we thought we wanted, we slowly awaken to the harsh reality that what we wanted perhaps wasn't exactly what could make us truly happy or was a true reflection of our needs. We begin to realize a little too late that we made the wrong choices, and as a consequence of that our lives have turned out to be something dissimilar to what we thought they would be. Instead of being happy at achieving what we set out to achieve we start to question the validity of what we wanted?
This is a painful junction. And I think this is what is called mid-life crises, when we begin to get a strange feeling over and over again that somehow we did not get out of life all what we had dreamed of, that somehow we got lost on the way, that somehow the definitions of happiness and success accepted at 20 turned out to be very limited at 40 and so on.
Increasingly I see people who are disillusioned and despaired at how their lives have unfolded, they are shocked at the future they have arrived at after years of anticipation and struggle. Is it a human weakness? this myopia? this grave inability to assess our own needs and wants, this gross disconnect we have between what is important to us in actuality and what we assume or think is important to us for false reasons.
Is it that we are doomed to see our dreams transform into nightmares? Or is it that we as humans have lost total touch with out inner soul, our inner being, which is not moved by materialism, by societal standards, by superficial wants... are we so lost within our own selves that its impossible for us to tune into our visceral needs? Is there ever a time in our lives where we are in sync with these very needy and important needs?
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