Meeting in Dreams

Do you remember the last time you met someone in your dreams? 

Maybe it was a celebrity, or a movie star, or a character from a cartoon show when you were a kid.

Maybe it was someone you actually knew in your past. Or maybe you were dreaming about your spouse or kids.

And maybe the dream feels real – maybe it even feels urgent, or terrifying. 

But no matter what, when you wake up, you think, “Oh, it was just a dream.”

“Just a dream.” That means it isn’t important. That means, it wasn’t real. 

Reality is what matters. Real people are the ones who matter.

But actually, the deepest sickness of our society might be that a great many of us have started to prefer dream people to real people. We’ve chosen the dream over reality – and it’s getting harder and harder for us to wake up. 

The Temptation of the less-than-real

There have always been people who would prefer to escape from reality into fantasy. 

People have always taken refuge from the real world by becoming drunkards. 

But now there’s a new temptation to prefer an artificial experience to the real thing. 

And that is through screens. 

We have, as a society, made the choice to prefer to spend time with celebrities, TV personalities, sports heroes, commentators and analysts - the people that we spend all of our time viewing on screens or online rather than with real people in the same room with us. 

We are turning away from the people next to us, and we’re going back to sleep, and dealing not with people as they are, but as they are artificially represented. 

We have rejected real people for dream people.

Dream-People

The difference between dreams and reality is that there’s always more to reality.

When something is real, you can always understand it better, get behind it, inside it, deeper within it. 

But in dreams, the presentation is all there is. 

Big Bird in your dream is just Big Bird in your dream. The same with your middle-school math teacher. He doesn’t have a history, you can’t find out more about what motivates him, or what he thinks about things. He just comes into your dream, does his bit, and that’s it.

And that’s the way people are on screens. 

In screens, people are just reduced to our political enemies or our political allies. That’s it. We don’t get to know them. They don’t get to know us. They’re just for us or against us.

In screens, actors, celebrities, musicians – they’re just there to entertain us. That’s it. We don’t get to know them. They don’t get to know us. They’re just there to do their bit until the videos run out. 

In screens, people who suffer tragedies – people who die violently or undergo some harrowing experience – they’re just there to tweak our sense of compassion without actually giving us any responsibility or opportunity to help.

We hear about someone assassinated, or someone caught up in some scandal, or some legal nightmare – and we talk about it with people in concerned voices and shake our heads and say it’s such a shame – and then we move on. 

Maybe we feel a little interested in these figures we hear about and read about – so we look up their Wikipedia page, read a little about their biography, their politics, their resume, their personal life – and then that’s it. It’s over. There’s nowhere to go. 

Because to us, they’re not three-dimensional people. They’re just their public persona – like the dream-person is just a random moment in a dream and nothing more.  

We weren’t made to pay much attention to people in our dreams. And we weren’t made to pay much attention to people we only know about through screens.

The people we were made to pay attention to are the people in the same three dimensional reality as we are.

And this is the tragedy — the more we live among dream-people, the less we are able to love real ones.”

A Practical Bias for Real People

Real people – the people we meet and interact with and live with face-to-face

These people are the ones whose richness we’ll never exhaust. 

There is always more to understand. 

They are always mysterious. Always surprising. And always challenging our preconceptions.

So practically speaking, what can you do to spend less time on screens, and more time with people?

Have meals and go on walks with the people you love. And never look at your screen while you’re with them.

Put down your phone in public places and make eye contact and talk to strangers. And if you can, say “God bless” when you part ways.

Be interested in your coworkers, ask about their families.

Stay after mass and talk to people at Church. 

Never suggest to them that the dream-people in your phone are more interesting than the real people present to you in the real world.  

The Most Real Person

The people around you are more real, more present to you than the people you watch and think about through your screens.

Which is why you should invest more attention on the people physically around you.

But there’s someone who’s more real, and more close to you even than that. There is Christ Himself, dwelling in your soul. The realest Person there is. So close to you that He’s inside you.

And just as we have to detach from screens to get closer to the people around us, so we have to detach from the people around us to get closer to Christ in prayer.

A Holy, virtuous life, is a process of engaging more and more deeply with reality, and that means investing more and more time and energy in the people closest to you. 

That’s what it looks like for life to get healthier and healthier, better and better, happier and happier.

Less screens. More focus on the people around you. And the most focus, through a regular commitment to prayer, to the Person within you.

That’s what it means to choose reality over dreams. That’s how we prepare to leave this world of shadows, and wake up to the boundless reality of Heaven. 

Resolution - Today, I’ll put my phone away and share a meal or walk with someone I love — and be fully present.

If you enjoyed this meditation, subscribe below.