When I was seven, I dreamt about a girl, my age, wearing her first and favourite pair of pristine white laced school shoes, dashing through flowers half her height. A trail of flying petals fluttered in her wake wherever she swept past. Finally, when her limbs stopped pumping, her face showed no signs of exhaustion, her shoes were hardly blemished, and the field of flowers stood, not battered by the force that had swept through them. In my fantasy of perfection, if dreams were to be believed, the girl’s speed would have rivalled Usain Bolt’s.
Dreams are very much shaped by our reality. This recurring fantasy had stemmed from all the way when a merry trio had been at the opposite end of the school when the recess bell, signaling for all to gather at the other end of the school, had rung. A fierce dash had commenced, each straining their legs to reach the assembly point before the others, and finally when they had reached, red-cheeked and puffing with exertion, the first words that spilled out were not “We made it!” but the oft-repeated, adolescent, “Me, first!”
Just like how a small spark can light a fire, it is the smallest events like this that inflamed my passion for sprinting. Every night after as I laid in bed waiting for sleep to overtake me, I thought about how I would add new dimensions to that perfect picture. Eventually, my dreamscape was no longer painted in various shades of colours. My imagination constrained itself to a football field and an oval track. This scene was where fantasy merged with reality.
In terms of scenery, everything changed. Yet, in essence, my dream had hardly changed. The joy of being ahead of everyone else kept this dream alive and stoked the flame within me, feeding the mental fuel needed to endure afternoons of painful training. I never allowed myself to forget the reason for the tears and the sweat. In all its beauty and flawlessness, fantasy is what we wish for, in our deepest fibres, that we will one day be able to achieve it. It springs from reality, and of our own worldly desires, but as it evolves, as it only can in our dreams, our actions change to shape what we see in fantasy. Nine years later, that earnest belief in my dream, the consequent action of changing fantasy into reality, allowed me to understand what triumph truly entailed. As remnants of adrenaline coursed through my body, the endless replay, in my mind, of the girl, dressed in the defining red representative of her House, forming the pinnacle of a reverse “V” on the track — knowing that I had surpassed everyone else to be the first — awakened every fibre of my body to the truth of how fantasy had crafted the beauty of a triumphant reality.
Addicts rely on drugs because they want the hallucinatory visions; the feeling of freedom that they can obtain; the total distortion between reality and fantasy. Craving the escape from the dreary reality, they only deceive themselves into thinking that they have achieved whatever they had wished for. It is such a pitiful existence, craving to live a life of illusion, yet, at the same time, holding the cruel truth in their hearts — that when they wake up from experiencing utopia, reality has not changed at all.
Life does not reward those who do not value it, those who do not respect it, and those who do not work for it. Those addicts, choosing to dream for a reality they did not and will not work for, have wasted away in the end and have lost their life.
Immersed in the beauty and flawlessness of my dreamland, what makes me so different from a drug addict? Unlike them, I can make my dreams turn into reality. Through the power of belief and effort, my reality changes to fit my fantasy. That change is everlasting. No one can deny me my reality.
A person with a dream is most powerful when he is willing to work for it. He may muster every strength, grasp every opportunity, and exhaust every resource to make his reality fit his fantasy. It is, perhaps, only in this way that we, humans, equipped with the power of wonderful imagination and the indomitable flame of human spirit, will continue to achieve great things we have only once dreamt of.
Author Bio: Yee Yan is a Year 4 student from Singapore doing a double degree in Business and Law. When she is not studying hard to graduate, she daydreams, watches Korean variety shows, and writes. Her goal is to write a full-length fantasy novel, although that’s starting to look increasingly unlikely. While Yee Yan is battling procrastination, she is growing fatter with all the tasty dim sum she loves to eat with her local Hong Kong friends.