A Glass Castle

Dream Center (n.) - It is a place where it would seem anything is possible, should you put your mind to it (so to speak). The Dream Center is a place where thoughts collide in conceptual blends without limitation, without doubt. (- Mr. Azure)

The question: what does your Dream Center look like?

My dream center is a notebook and a pen, and words upon words, so many words. Sometimes they seem powerful and sometimes they feel empty, yet they are created and there they are. My dream center is a mind early in the morning trying to get through a long run without going insane. It's imagining all the possibilities for the day, drawing close to the possibilities one hopes for, that maybe a conversation would be had or thoughts could be expressed without inhibition. It's building glass castles and mountains among the clouds in one's mind.

It's listening to the same song on repeat for hours, writing the structure for an essay and putting hope in one's imagination to fill in the gaps. It's bright eyes reading words of others to fill the palette of the mind with all sorts of colors and textures and endless possibilities.

My dream center is a couch in a condo in Panama City Beach with everyone else asleep, watching the sun rise, listening to good music, reading the Word and praising God, and typing on a keyboard in the hope that something readable might come out of it. 

My dream center is structured by where and when I use it, but is it actually limited? Only by what I know, but not even then, if I have any belief in a God at all. My dreams are unlimited, they have no boundaries and my hopes are infinite. All the farther to fall when you hit reality, you say - whatever. I will have sailed to higher heights, and greater depths, and tasted more sweetly, and dreamt bigger. And I've got a safety net, a place to rest my head when my dreams exhaust me. I'm not worried.

The hardest part is connecting my dream center to reality. It's like trying to put a funnel on the bottom of a bowl of marbles that don't all quite fit. There's shaking, reconfiguring, and an attempt at jamming that's usually just vaguely painful. But I feel that the process is necessary. Dreams are great; reality is better. The hardest time to wake up in the morning is when your sleeping dream is better than your waking reality.

What are you doing tomorrow? How can you make it something that you will definitely want to wake up for? Dream a little - and then make it happen. Go. Dream, explore, discover.

(This is another response to the illustrious Mr. Azure's thoughts over on dreamupagain.blogspot.com. Go read him too!)