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To dream is human, and imagination is the one thing that has got us where we are today. To say that there is no longer a place for dreaming and imagination in this brave modern world of ours is to say that we have reached the end of the line, that we have no place left to go. Human beings will always continue to momentarily gaze, eyes unfocused, into foggy nothingness or distant horizon, and dream. Actually, the advanced technology gives us a better change to this than anything ever before. TV, videos, computer games, to name just a few, are all tickets to imaginary worlds. Dreams for sale. And the book, the novel, is not dead either, quite the opposite in fact .
Dreaming and science are in symbiosis with each other. Without the former there could surely not be the latter. If the ancient Greeks had not dreamed about Icarus, would we have airplanes? If Columbus had not dreamed that there is land beyond the sunset, land to west of West, would anyone have found any reason to sail there? There will always be great soulful men with grand visions and dreams, and there will always be great men of science, who burn to prove that those visions and dreams are true or false. Men had visited the moon in their dreams thousands of times before it was actually done, and it has been dreamed thousands of times after that. Science fiction authors imagine unlikely futures, and to everybody's surprise the technology catches up, and afterwards those same writers, or the next generation, dream unlikely futures based upon the new discoveries. Of course, most of those dream futures stay just that, dreams, but few drive scientists into brilliant frenzies of creation, and the cycle goes on and on, to infinity. When William Gibson wrote his novel "Neuromancer" less than ten years ago, it was just another science fiction book. But today Virtual Reality, people being able to enter computer generated worlds via special helmets, is no longer just science fiction. Imagination is fuel to science, and vice versa .
Though times change people continue to dream. Even the basic subject of dreams stays almost the same. Granted, we no longer entertain ourselves with imaginary stories about quarrelsome gods of Olympus, but even though faces and settings change the essence of the tales does not. Not that all those old heroes and divine beings are gone. They might have been through more than a few changes during the years but Thor and Morpheus, to name just two, still go on in their continuous monthly adventures in comic books, if no where else. And are monsterous terminator cyborgs and godlike artificial intelligences of today's science fiction, or Batman and the other caped crusaders of comic books, or the Bold and the Beautiful really all that different from wrathful gods, devious dragons, knights of the round table, or the creatures of Fairyland? Heaven and Hell might have changed into virtual reality but in the Theatre of Dreams of this modern era the tales of love, hate, lust, war, sacrifice, revenge and redemption are still going strong. In a way we are fortunate that we have such a rich mythological base, accumulated through ages, to draw upon. Dreams shift and change, merge and split, turn into something new, but they never really die or disappear without leaving at least faint echoes rippling through the waves of time. Vampires and werewolves might have changed their capes and canes into boots and leather jackets, and their hoods and jewellery into sunglasses and computer wiring, but they still haunt our imagination .
Imagination is what makes us human. We have lived without technology but never without dreams. It might even be that in distant, or not so distant, future science and technology reach the point where they have been taken beyond the understanding of the common man. We dreamed when we still thought that fire was magic, and we will dream when we think so again. Come what may, people will continue to dream. Imagination has taken as this far, and it will take us to wherever it is that we are going. As for that, my imagination tells me that to say that the sky is the limit is to be too modest .
