Flada Blog

I just finished watching the movie The Final Cut starring Robin Williams as a cutter. In this somewhat futuristic movie, cutters are people who edit the details of a dead person’s life (audio and video) which are recovered from an implant that the person received while they were still in utero. I had seen the movie previously, for that matter we have the DVD. Although I found the film to be full of plot holes, even mediocre movies can be thought provoking.

My particular thoughts about this film focus on a brief sequence where the protagonist is showing his love interest some footage from “defective” implants that couldn’t differentiate between actual events and those that took place only in the mind. One girl is on a swing at the park and her video morphs from her swinging to her soaring through the sky.

This got me thinking about youth and how children actually seem to have imaginations that are powerful enough to allow them to dream while they are awake. I remember my childhood and how fantastic and new everything was. Of course since I knew so little about how things work, it was very easy to fill in my own details. And to me at the time, my details were real. Something both great and terrible happens to us as we age, though. We decide we know too much. We stop dreaming while we are awake.

This is great because it is the power that lets us retain our lessons which in turn keeps the machinery of the world, and in fact of life, running. It’s also a tragedy, however, because it limits our abilities to gain new insights. It keeps us focused on the things we have been told or the way we’ve always done things instead of looking for new and better ways to accomplish things. But worst of all, it limits our potential by stifling our imagination.

In my college Philosophy class, the professor once discussed how humans have a unique ability among animals to live in a dichotomy. The actual is not the same as the potential. We each have a vision of how we want things to be that is different from how things actually are. This dichotomy can cause sadness or melancholy because we always seem to be trapped in the world of actual and unable to achieve the “possible.” Partially, this is because our minds change the possible when we start to get close to it. The dichotomy is also the source of just about every great thing that mankind has accomplished, because we constantly strive to change the actual.

When we are children, however, we don’t really know that anything is impossible, so the possible and the impossible are all achievable as far as we’re concerned. Unfortunately, we live in societies that quickly draw lines between possible and impossible. Even worse, the lines are often pushed farther and farther into the territory of what is possible making us think that many things that are actually achievable are in fact not within our grasps. Let’s say that you had a dream of growing up to be a popular singer. Even if you are a great singer, you were probably told time and again to be realistic, that your dreams had no chance of ever happening. After enough time this possibility becomes an impossibility in your mind. So you give up your dreams.

Well, don’t do this to your kids. Don’t do this to your friends. Don’t do this to your enemies. Most of their dreams are possible–there are people who become popular singers all the time, proving it is possible.

If we stop crushing dreams, we may find that some things that we all agree are impossible are actually not so hopeless after all.

Imagine what could be accomplished if we rediscover the ability to dream while we are awake.