The Dreams Forgotten Today

This is one of those ruminative posts that are best left unread, but here's a ruminative picture anyway

Evening today, I took the DSLR up to the roof. It was up there with me, of course, for taking pictures, but what I had really wanted to do was to spend a few moments not thinking.

But nothing can outrun thought; that was the bit of wisdom you pick from Norse mythology, and I was soon standing by the fence to stare blankly into the sunset. The camera went to auto-sleep.

You don’t outrun Thought. You sit down and face it. It’s best to even serve crackers and tea.

There is a girl, and she is now across the ocean, pursuing a dream. For the months she was there, I had always considered her as amazing and courageous. And there really is no one I knew who is as brave as her, and in a time where most people dream only to fantasise, she dreamt to fulfil it.

Today she gave me her portfolio website. It was for an article she wrote on Twilight, and it was to follow up on our conversation on it.

I read the article. And then I read all of her articles. And then I turned off the computer and took the camera up to the roof, hoping not to think.

Why? Because I was suddenly struck with something. It was a curious feeling; parts of it were fear, mingled with memories and a cold stab of realisation. Inevitably in life, you get epiphanies. But epiphanies aren’t all warm, bursting realisations of feelings and the sudden will to decide – they are, in parts, the plunge into cold arctic waters, where the pain stabs you like needles, stopping your heart, freezing your mind.

A plunge into reality.

Have you ever dreamt?

You have to. Nobody can live a life without dreaming of something. The difference is whether the dream is realised or otherwise. Dreams become reality too. And dreams are hard to achieve.

I dreamt a lot, but I dreamt to fantasise. That is the fact.

When I was in middle school I dreamt to the point where dreams didn’t matter, because that was it; dreams that you make to smile to, to escape the conundrums of life as it rolls onwards into greyer and greyer territories. I had never given thought on dreams. It was a life where I was ready to live on without knowing where to go. I never studied. I never found a passion. I played and lazed and day-dreamt, sure that in spite of everything, there’s always a part of the world that I can find a place to stand in. And that was all I needed. Just a place to stand. I didn’t need to move.

I didn’t know what to do. Or rather, I never wanted to do anything.

Writing was a curious thing then. I loved writing. It helped with the fact that I day-dreamt and these dreams were mostly worlds as large as imagination could make. In my memory, I had never chosen a single exam essay that would need me to write a factual piece. It was always the stories.

One day a teacher said to me; “You write well.”

It was the greatest day of my teenage life.

“Have you ever considered a writing career?”

Truth be told, I hadn’t. It wasn’t until then that I had even dared to imagine that somehow, I could write into my adult life, and maybe even earn a living out of it.

But I was young, and naïve, and ignorant, and I had only dreamt to fantasise, so I said “No.”

“Have you ever considered Journalism?”

Journalism, then, was a new world in itself. I do not fancy myself as a good reader, and somehow it never occurred to me that journalists write. It was always as though they had simply walked out to get a story, walked back in, and read into the microphone. That would become the day’s headlines.

“You could try for it,” said the teacher.

And then, I felt, I really could.

That day onwards, I had a Dream. If stories were the only thing that I could make, and then, somehow, tell it out, with words or voices, then I would become a storyteller. It was a Dreamlike prospect. A modern day storyteller, a man with a book in one hand, a pencil in the other, and he would write stories that would stay and entertain and inspire. And Journalism, whatever it was, would be a way to start going.

When my father gave me the Talk, I told him I wanted to pursue Journalism. It was a joke to him. Here was a guy who had never read the newspaper, never seen the news, never written anything more than fiction and nonsense and he had the audacity to suggest a future in Journalism. But I was young and naïve and ignorant, and I had a dream to fulfil, so I insisted.

To my surprise, he allowed me so. In the coming months, he found the quickest way for me to do it, and with my mother in tow, we had a course to head towards. All I needed was 5 credits for my SPM. And that was all I took.

Before I applied for good, my father threw a newspaper page into my lap. It was an application form for The Star’s BRATs program. It was a program to encourage young and aspiring journalists, and that was what I was. That week, I sat up in the nights to fill it.

There was that bit that required me to write about myself, and why I would want to join. It was a difficult bit, because I could easily make something up for it, and knowing that I really couldn’t. It had to be true. And I still didn’t know why I wanted to do journalism, except that it would allow me to write.

It took many nights, but at the last night before I had to submit, I took the pen and wrote;

I want to be a journalist because I like telling stories. I want to be a storyteller, and what better stories can there be told but real ones?

(It was longer then, and much more glorified, but I’d be hard pressed to remember what I actually wrote).

I didn’t know if it was true then, what I wrote. But of all the things I would make up, that one would sound the truest. I put the form into an envelope and mailed it. A few weeks later, the acceptance letter came, and I found myself flying alone to Kelantan for the program.

For the days there, in the program, what I had written slowly became truer and truer.

I found that there were stories everywhere if you knew where to look. Sometimes it takes a single question. Sometimes it takes a sight. Sometimes, they’re the stories you tell just by the thought of it. They were both true stories, and made up stories. And I realised that I like it. I could do this. I could be a journalist, and write about true stories. And I would write them not as news, but as tales, as Stories, and people would read them and feel something.

I came back, and enrolled into TARC and straight into my Diploma in Journalism. For those two years, what I had written on the form stayed at the back of my head. I may not have been a good student, but I made sure I got through. And then I progressed to my Degree, which took me to UTAR.

Two years later, and those words faded. Those dreams, they became the ones I made to fantasise. They were bygone, and stupid. I wouldn’t say reality put me in check. It was more like complacency. And the slow realisation that I wasn’t cut out for Journalism.

The reason was simple, and it was because I am lazy. The other reasons were that I lacked every pretty much every skill you would need to be a journalist. I have the curiosity of a pebble. I cannot, for the life of me, ask questions, or make new ones as I go. I am bad with people, and till today the thought of meeting people terrifies me. What I had was just the passable skill to write, maybe articulate well enough to work slightly above average. That was all. I had the pen, but nothing else.

Soon, I was simply floating along. I did just enough to graduate. I held a degree for a job I can’t do.

And somehow, I found a job, and in Journalism. Today, I write for a living. When people asked, I would still tell them my passion is to write.

Only to write. I had forgotten what it was to be a storyteller.

This girl, now across the ocean, possibly asleep, and ready to wake up soon to face her challenges and fulfil her dream, has done more to me than just enlighten me on the subject of a contemporary hit of a vampire novel. What she had done is the equivalent of pushing me off the Titanic and letting me hit the icy waters, before pulling me out with a grappling hook.

It is this girl that, at the age of 18, had written for a newspaper, and what she had written were fantastic pieces. She has written them for five years, before flying off for her dreams. She has been writing the things I had wanted to write, but had never done so.

What have I done over the past 5 years? I had dreamt, and I let it fade. I studied for passion first, which slowly became a duty, and later just an obligation. And now, I write for a technology magazine, which is absolutely the best magazine one would ever hope to be hired into, but what had I truly written? The months were just me regurgitating tech facts and press releases. Try as I might to breathe life over my stagnating writing, and all I could manage were pathetic opening lines that just as easily would divulge back into boring, uninspired writing. I have not been asking questions at events, and while I justify it with the fact that there was really never any need to, the truth is that I never had a question. And every day I live with the fact that sooner or later people would find out that I’m barely anywhere knowledgeable in the tech and IT industry. I have only been getting by with sheer luck and the patience of others.

Where am I now?

What the fuck have I been doing?

And I’m here, really, to know that I’ve just been back to dreams that fantasise.

I have nothing to fulfil anymore.

You do not outrun Thought. You sit down and confront it. At best, you talk to it. It’ll talk back.

So here I am, confronting it, and talking to it for the first time in my life.

And here is me telling myself that I have a dream to fulfil.

I don’t know if it’ll work, or if I’ll just as easily regressed back to complacency, ready to accept life as the spot in which I can only stand in. I have no faith in myself. But these days – these past 14 days, where I am really living a dream that is wonderful, surreal, fantastic, and something that I couldn’t dare believe in, maybe it’s time that I start believing in myself to pull it through.

I think, for once, and truthfully, I want to dream to fulfil.

Somewhere at the back of my head is still the image of the storyteller, with his pencil and paper. Somewhere along with it is the other image of the guy who believed that he can, somehow, tell true stories.

I think it’s time I go and say hi to them again.