First: Other people’s pictures [edited to remove some images from pinterest]. My currently in progress quilt is a kind of illustration of the post but on Tuesday my lap top broke – I hope I will find out later today if it’s coming back restored or beyond economic repair. Yesterday my phone broke and that is definitely beyond economic repair. Apparently, I’m surrounded by technology going into spontaneous melt down and I can’t post any new photos.

This is a sequel of sorts to Monday’s post, From the Heart…, for TTT with Rebecca Lynne and the wonderful winged creature above links (somewhat tenuously!) back to the theme of prayer flags.

The wind horse is an allegory for the human soul in the shamanistic tradition of Central Asia. InTibetan Buddhism, it was included as the pivotal element in the center of the four animals symbolizing the cardinal directions and a symbol of the idea of well-being or good fortune. It has also given the name to a type of prayer flag that has the five animals printed on it. (Wikipedia)

I’ve already spoken quite a lot, in From the Heart…, about sorrow and making this prayer flag…

HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

W.B.Yeats

(You might also like to visit this stunning gallery He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven A Flickr gallery curated by tintocktap)

“When Peter Drucker observed that “no one has ever failed to find the facts he is looking for,” he was talking about confirmation bias, known as the most dependable of all delusions. What is confirmation bias? It’s when we pay attention to information that confirms what we want to believe, and ignore information that challenges it”.

And looking back I could see the prayer flag incident (PFI) had been foreshadowed, in small ways, many times over the years. Looking back I could have seen it coming. It’s easy to say ‘with hindsight I have new information and I would do things differently’ but the honest, rational part of me has to acknowledge that with hindsight there is no new information. And, it seems to me, this is how confirmation bias works. Each time the dream is challenged by reality all the information necessary is available and the dream is injured by the confrontation. And, because I was too much in love with the dream itself, each time I chose to discount the reality and focus on healing the injured dream. And this is what I mean by treading too softly. It was valuing the dream as a beautiful place to escape to, to avoid the real world, and putting energy into maintaining it as a dream. And put like this, I think we can safely say that unless a Fairy Godmother comes along or Prince Charming turns up the chances of a dream valued like this and dreamed in this way coming true are probably just about zero.

So how can we make our dreams comes true?

I would love to hear anyone’s views/tips on this.

I am now thinking of dreams more as seeds than as wonderful gardens of flowers in full bloom. And I’m thinking that the value of these dream seeds is not to polish and perfect them but to make them real. And I’m thinking to make them real they need to be planted and nurtured in both the dream world and the real world.

As the children who ‘can’t draw’ demonstrate the real world can be hard on dreams. Planting the seed of a dream in the real world makes us very vulnerable and involves taking risks – imagine how you would feel if you were the speaker in Yeat’s poem and your beloved just laughed or mocked or despised or pitied you.

So our little dream seeds need to be strong enough in the dream world not to be destroyed by the first conflict they encounter with the external world. But perhaps they need to have that conflict, and we need to engage with it and learn from it in order for us to make the concrete changes that will be necessary to realize the dream and that can take hard work and self belief and flexibility. And it won’t always be easy.

For example, if we dream of making a ‘Dear Jane’ quilt or McTavishing like an expert but we’ve never sewn anything much before we might have to learn new skills and up our patience. We might sometimes need a lot of self discipline to stick with it when when we get bored or find things difficult or get distracted or receive negative feedback from others. We will almost certainly need some help and support  perhaps – going to a class, reading a tutorial or encouragement from friends when we feel like abandoning it to the UFO pile. And this sort of dream – where we have a lot of control over the real world factors required to make it come true – is well within the reach of most of us if we are prepared to put in the work.

But then there are the dreams where, in reality, we don’t have a lot of of control over external events, such as falling in love with the wrong person, being bereaved, accidents, illness…and harsh and sad and devastating as it is, some of these dreams are never going to come true.

With these dreams we feel as if we have made a mutual contract with another person/the universe/fate like Alice does with the unicorn…

Alice could not help her lips curling up into a smile as she began: ‘Do you know, I always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!’
‘Well, now that we have seen each other,’ said the Unicorn, ‘if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?’ (Alice Through the Looking Glass)