A DREAM COUNTRY

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 59, Issue 4220, 6 December 1939, Page 11

A DREAM COUNTRY

VISITS CAN BE MADE. Dreams are reputed to be vain things, and yet once upon a time they were a determining influence in many lives. The distant ancients attached to them great significance, treating them in many cases as Divine communications. To-day there are still to be found people who have the faculty of foreseeing in dreams what prove to have been coming events. But any form of second sight is apt to be sceptically regarded in a generation which prides itself on being pre-eminently scientific. Natural dreaming is entirely anarchical; it is a state in which the subconscious assumes control. Normally, the familiar phantasmagoria □f the night is utterly devoid of interest, even to the person who experiences it. There is, however, a form of the process which is akin but voluntary. Practised with restraint it can be of value in maintaining or restoring mental poise and emotional health. All unsuspected by themselves, what many overstrained and despairing men and women need for their recovery is to take an occasional run into the dream country.

It is a fair and blessed country, the secret resort of many a troubled soul. Its frontiers are coterminous with the imagination; no passport is' necessary in order to obtain entry. It is the one country into which we may all at times escape and be vicariously, even if only temporarily, happy. The day dream has been severely condemned by those sometimes jarring people of intensely practical mind. And yet it is a merciful way of escape when life becomes insufferably harsh. Every child lives much in a dream world, which he finds far more alluring than the one in which he is actually living. Time and again

mother sees in her small boy’s eyes unmistakable signs that he is off again on another of his many excursions to the dream country. As we grow older these excursions are not less frequent; we only become more skilled in the art of concealment. Those youths and maidens you see in thousands pairing every Sunday or holiday are all denizens of the dream country. Their lot may be humble, their means scant, but in the dream country these things are of no account. A king’s ransom could not purchase the pleasure these youthful couples are getting out of the dreams which they are confident will one day come true. Their elders affect to smile, but it is usually with the happy memory that they, too, once came along that way. And, although it was all a youthful dream, it did not by any means end in disillusionment. The reality proved all the more pleasing because of the dreaming. Parents are apt to believe that they have reached the stage of hard common sense. And in most cases they have probably abandoned the forward day dream for themselves. -But in their children they start afresh. How roseate is mother’s dream picture of her boy’s future. How vividly father can foresee the full flower of his tiny daughter’s growing beauty. Even the loneliest of souls have equally their dream country. Probably with most people the principal ingredients of that country are affluence and ease and fame. With some it is a quiet, well-remembered spot where love took root, or where youth was spent. The visits can be made without money and without price; it is merely a matter of letting our workaday environment fade and letting thought off the leash. Such moments are not necessarily moments of indolence; they can often be soothing and inspiring in their efforts. Laurence Sterne visited ofttimes the dream country, and he has paid his due in words of praise: “When the way is too rough for my feet or too steep for my strength, I get off it to some smooth velvet path which Fancy has scattered over with rosebuds of delight; and, having taken a few turns in it, come back strengthened and refreshed.” For the young these occasional visits to the dream country reinforce the resolve to aspire and to achieve. In maturity a visit may be as an oasis when life has assumed—as it sometimes can—the aspect of an arid desert. For the elderly the dream country can be as a suburb of the Celestial City. Sitting in the sweet twilight calm awaiting the dawn of the everlasting day, “their heaven commences ere the world be past.”

They feel themselves consorting with those whom they have “loved long since and lost a while.” There are countless other forms of escape from reality for which people freely spend money. They go beyond themselves seeking mental emotional refreshment, and they miss it. More wise, they would withdraw within themselves and find it. The great mystics have simply been men with whom visiting the dream country had become a habit in a quest for their soul’s peace and for their Divine message. In these present days of dread redlism and constant urgent need for action, men and women who wish to preserve their emotional balance, and even their sanity, will not neglect to visit the dream country. For, even while earth resounds with echoes of war, it is no disloyalty to duty to indulge for a few moments in some day dream of a wiser, friendlier, better world. Dreams of it may help to hasten it. For dreams sometimes come .true, and it is open to each of us to help the coming of such dreams into actual being. “I, being poor, have • only my dreams,” wrote W. B. Yeats, the Irish poet. But with his dreams wisely in- , dulged, how rich he, and any of us, may be. It is the medical verdict, and experience upholds it, that too constant living with reality can become physically unbearable and harmful. The affirmation is equally applicable to the life that is spiritual. Paralysis is apt to beset it unless there is occasional escape to the sunlit summits of the Delectable Mountains. For in every generation countless legions of humble, heart-weary men and women have found their most completely satisfying comfort in turning aside to the green pastures and still waters of the dream country.