A blind man's dream

And so I dream on. Let the world call me a fool; let people see what they can and ignore what they can’t. Nothing would spoil my dream.

In my dream, I see. The green meadows, the blue sky with that single cloud drifting away like fluffy cotton. The evening sun turns the western sky to blotches of purple and deep red. It goes down amidst the ashening horizon which the night would paint with deep dark.
And then... I see that miracle arcing across the blue as if a child’s hand has stroked the canvas. Shades of violet, indigo, blue and green sparkle in the receding light.

The sight caught my breath. Oh god, should this be a dream? Can’t this be real? Consciousness, the hammer blow on my spirit, returned me to reality. The pain of the lost dream was so fresh that I mourned it hours after the day broke and duties beckoned. “Hey...what’s that you think about, so deep?” came the voice of a friend, who couldn’t see the heart that wept.

I smiled for the first time. A faint stretch of face muscles all right, but it lifted my spirits and brought spring to my steps.

“What’s that you think of so deep?” asked the man at the corner shop. Oh, even he couldn’t see the mourning heart!

I grinned so wide that the man in the shop thought hard and sat back on his seat in bemused silence.

Then the butcher and the baker asked me if I dreamt of a fortune. With the knife in the hand and the oven open, they failed to see the mourning heart.

‘All of them are blind,’ I told myself and laughed out loud. ‘All of them are, indeed, blind. So blind that they couldn’t see past my face.’

My heart felt lighter. There was sunshine in my inner self. There was not just the spring in my step, but a healthy stride as I marched forward to meet the day’s challenges.

When bedtime came, the dreams returned. So colourful and so bright they felt real. ‘Aren’t they actually real?’ I asked myself and then it occurred.

The dreams were real, so real that no one could see and cherish its beauty the way I did. It was my own, private world where I alone saw what I did. Reality is what we make of our lives, not what others make for us.

Never before did the world seem so small, so trivial. Its problems so unreal that my theatrics that morning seemed a bit over the top.