We often hear people say things like: "I dream to be a pilot when I grow up", "I dream to go to the Carribean for my honeymoon" and "I dream of earning my first million by age thirty". Indeed, our dreams are synonymous with our aspirations. They are goals which, while at times far-fetched, we hope to achieve. However, far-fetched as dreams sometimes may be, there is still a place for dreams in our lives. Rudyard Kipling very succinctly sums up the importance and significance of dreams in this one line: “If you can dream and not make dreams your master”.
A person’s dreams push him to work harder, to struggle and strive so that he can fulfill his dreams. It is then through this process of struggling and striving that they achieve greatness. A good example would be Li Ka-Shing. He is the richest person of Chinese descent and has been touted as Asia’s most powerful man. However, he started life with very little. Yet, even at a tender age, he dreamt of being rich and powerful. This dreamt sustained his drive even under adverse conditions and helped him through the toughest of times. His efforts culminated in him building a multi-billion dollar business empire.
An individual’s dreams sometimes do not only affect himself. A single person’s dream can serve as a rallying point for a group of people, galvanizing them into action. This group of people thus inspired can often work miracles. Singapore is a product of such a process. Lee Kwan Yee had a dream of changing Singapore from an under-developed island into a bustling metropolis. This dream inspired people like Goh Keng Swee and Hon Sui Sen to join in his cause and brought people of different races, languages and religions together to build a developed city state in a short span of forty-three years.
Dreams are not only limited to individuals. A group of people can have a collective dream. In fact, many nations were built on their own respective dreams. Indeed, many countries are still pursuing their dreams. China demonstrates this very well. It is the collective dream of the Chinese People that woke the Chinese Dragon. It was China’s dream to be a global superpower, to be on par, if not superceding, America which drove China’s inexorable growth, allowing them to achieve a decade’s worth of double digit annual economic growth. The pursuit of this dream saw China sending their own astronauts and space shuttles into orbit, holding the Olympics in Beijing in 2008 and accumulating a sovereign wealth fund in excess of one trillion US dollars.
Of course, dreams do not always lead to good things. When Hitler dreamt of creating a thousand year Reich, he inadvertently plunged the world into a living nightmare instead. Hundreds of millions of people died in humanity’s greatest tragedy simply because of the power of a single megalomaniacal person’s dream. This shows how much dreams can change the course of humanity and hence their importance.
There is however one common trend in all the cases discussed thus far. All the dreams that have been mentioned were important only because those who dreamt those dreams were willing to put in extraordinary amounts of effort to fulfill their dreams. Woe is to the dreamer who gets lost in his reverie and does nothing. For such a person shall, instead of being inspired to greatness, languish in ignominy. We see this often in history. After the First World War, the world dreamt of a future without war. The League of Nations was set up as an attempt to realize this dream. However, without sufficient political will, all the best laid plans came to naught. After the Second World War, world leaders dreamt of a world where economic stability was ensured and financial catastrophes such as the Great Depression will not happen again. Thus was born the IMF and the World Bank. However, without concerted effort, these two institutions have been shown to be powerless in stopping the recent financial Tsunami from sweeping across the world, resulting in the greatest destruction of wealth since the Great Depression. Though the entirety of the damage has yet to be accounted for, some economists have predicted that it might even be greater than that of the Great Depression. Dreams are therefore important, but only if the dreamers are willing to grit their teeth and put their backs into turning their dreams into reality with the sweat on their brows.
Finally, there are people who function perfectly well without dreams. These people are content with a stable, albeit staid, existence. Just like the Deltas and the Epsilons in Huxley's Brave New World, these people are fine having no ideals and big ambitions. They do not need dreams to spur them to greatness, in fact, they may eschew greatness. It is not surprising that we do not hear great examples of these people, because these people are happy with their mediocrity. But we must face the reality that these people do exists in great numbers and that dreams are of little importance to them.
In conclusion, dreams are important as they can spur us to achieve greatness. They serve as beacons of light, beckoning us to excel. But dreams are only as important as we are willing to commit effort to realizing them. Without effort, dreams will remain as ethereal fantasies, insignificant and inconsequential.
