What Dreams May Come

I keep a fortune-cookie slip in my wallet. It reads, “Your dream will come true when you least expect it.” Let’s bracket, for the moment, the question of whether there’s any sane reason to take fortune-cookie slips seriously; we know there isn’t, and we know that we do anyway.

What’s the effect of being told that my dream will come true when I least expect it? Doesn’t that instigate a pattern of expectation that itself militates against dream-realization? Or does it mean that a second-tier dream comes true instead, because I was too attentively expecting the unexpected realization of the most prominent dream?

I’ve got a small assortment of dreams any one of which would be an ecstatic delight. One of them was eliminated in the past couple of days; I guess I mistakenly thought too seriously about it.

I suppose it is with dreams as with zazen, that in order to attain, you must banish consciousness of wanting-to-attain. So I’ll try to relinquish my dreams — and not simply so that I might attain one unexpected one, but so that I may appreciate more fully the dream-come-true that is my marvelous family, my fantastic dear wife, and the tremendous network of lovely friends into whose lives I’ve been woven.


The Young Fogey says:

I keep a fortune-cookie slip in my wallet. It reads, “Your dream will come true when you least expect it.” Let’s bracket, for the moment, the question of whether there’s any sane reason to take fortune-cookie slips seriously; we know there isn’t, and we know that we do anyway.

Mine is in the plastic window of the wallet with a paper icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and says, ‘Resist what others perceive of as your destiny’.

Not the same note of Christian and Zen detachment as your post but in its own way just as liberating.

The young fogey

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