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The Dream of Dreaming
by Mylisa Fibonacci and Jim Davidson
[email protected]

Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

And there was a time, not long ago
When the dream was young, we would go
Together. The stars would be ours...
—Jim Davidson, "On the Death of Friends", 1993

Everyone has had a dream. Many space enthusiasts remember the work of Gerard K. O'Neill and his dream of human settlements in space. In 1969, O'Neill asked, is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization? He and his students concluded that it is not. Many freedom enthusiasts have a dream of a free society, built on voluntary consent, without coercion or aggression as part of the mix.

Even the most deranged serial killer usually holds not only a reason, but a downright principle or dream of a better world when making the executive-level decision of taking another human life. It is not necessarily a good thing to have a dream of a "better world," if you use that dream to justify murder, or mass murder, as various politicians have evidently done over the years. It is, however, very difficult when your dreams are shattered.

People act upon dreams in attempts to bring them to reality. And, sometimes, we succeed. Sometimes...

Sometimes our dreams are crushed. When you see dozens of space entrepreneurs financially ruined, arrested, and in some cases (Gerald Bull, e.g.) killed, when you see plans to have tourists fly in space in 1992, in 2007, in 2011, repeatedly pushed back, denied permission, or viciously attacked through false allegations and malicious prosecution, you have to wonder whether the dream has been dying, or whether it has been poisoned.

When you see eight thousand protesters arrested in less than a year in a country which pretends to have freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, you have to wonder whether the dream of a free society founded on voluntary principles such as the zero aggression principle is dying, or being killed. Certainly we've seen precious little progress in the political efforts to vote more freedom into place.

So, the real question is not "what drives us?," nor "how do we bring our dreams into reality?" which may, or may not, be possible.... The really important question is, "What drives us in moments when our dreams have been destroyed?" There is the real mystery.

Once the dream is no longer alive, what becomes of us; of our reasons for the decisions that we make and the paths we choose. A dream having been kept alive through some form of critical life support is STILL alive. Breathing, feeling, holding on to a desired reality. Once any semblance of a desired reality is lost, we walk around like survivors of an F5 tornado, picking up scraps of shrapnel in an overwhelmed attempt to remember what the dream looked like.

Some stay in this state for the rest of their lives and never fully recover. Others jump up like gluttons for punishment and beg for more pain, letting their tolerance for pain dictate their strength in soul, and dive right back into an abyss that they themselves may not even believe in. But, it was here somewhere, goddammit...

The rest of us are somewhere in the middle, lost in a daze that leaves one looking like a deer caught in headlights. Standing still, yearning for that moment where the dream reappears and assures us that all is not without purpose. But, nothing comes to us at first, and then little comes at all. Looking all around, there are reminders of this past life, we can still feel it. It starts as a slow ache and then becomes a maddening scramble beneath a calm surface; to the point of rearranging your thought process to include concepts such as: cursed, deserving, pointless, give-up...

At some point, you keep going, anyway, not because the dream lives for you, but because you have the dream of dreaming. You remember what it was to have a dream, a purpose, and to pursue it with your entire being. You remember that feeling, and you pursue that feeling, either for yourself, or for your children, or for others to have. You either dream of dreaming yourself, or dream of dreaming vicariously.

Martin Luther King, Jr., had a dream. He was killed for having a dream which conflicted, in some parts, with the authoritarian system of the military-industrial-financial complex.

The dream of human settlement of space, the dream of bringing the resources of an entire Solar System to bear on the problems here on Earth, the dream of putting mineral extraction and manufacturing industries in airless environments where there is no living thing to be harmed, that dream conflicts with the narrow-minded "vision" of David Rockefeller and his Council on Foreign Relations friends, who demanded that frontiers be eliminated in the 1930s, and who ended the frontiers in 1957, 1967, and 1982 with various international treaties to prevent human settlement of Antarctica, space, and the sea beds.

The dream of thousands of new countries, some built on voluntary principles, is opposed by CFR luminaries like Warren Christopher who is quoted in the 1993 book "War and Anti-War" by Alvin and Heidi Toffler saying that if the Western powers and UN cannot force people to live in multi-ethnic countries with arbitrary borders, there would be "five thousand countries" as if that were some sort of horrendous problem, as if peoples with aboriginal claims to territory should not be able to have their own countries and sovereignty, as if individuals should not be free and sovereign—all seven billion of 'em.

Your dreams are under attack. Your dreams have been shattered. Your dreams have been destroyed.

Choose to dream, again. Choose to dream the dream of dreaming. Envision the world as you would have it be and build it.

Mylisa and Jim are anti-war activists. The above essay is their first work as co-authors.

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