I remember a morning just before my foreclosure process began. I was rushing to make my bed while simultaneously planning out what to put in my daughters’ lunch boxes. My youngest daughter, who was seven at the time, came in and said, “Oh mom, can I draw you a picture of my dream?” “Yes,” I said as I continued to rush around pulling blankets, placing pillows and scouring the pantry with my mind’s eye for nutritious, ready-made items. She climbed into the corner chair with her mini-white board and dry erase markers and started drawing and talking.
“Most people’s dreams are like this,” she said as she drew a purple stick figure upside with its head in a box. She held it up for me to see as I tucked a sheet corner. She took extra care to make sure that I understood the box around the head was the dream. “But I dream like this” she continued as she drew an oval shape with a small opening at the top around the head of an upright stick figure. With this, I walked over and squeezed myself into the chair next to her. “Most people can’t get out of their dreams,” she said, “but mine have small openings like this and I can get out of them and into another one.”
I don’t remember what I said in response, or how the rest of the day went, but I remember being awed by her insight and her matter-of-fact way of conveying this truth she had discovered. She was specifically referring to her ability to lucid dream—to be aware within a dream that you are dreaming, and then realize you have the power to change the dream if you chose. But her insight spoke to so much more than her nocturnal ventures. To me, it spoke to the whole structure of life.
Don Miguel Ruiz in his book, The Four Agreements: A Toltec Book of Wisdom says, “Humans are dreaming all the time. Before we were born the humans before us created a big outside dream that we will call society’s dream or the dream of the planet. The dream of the planet is the collective dream of billions of smaller, personal dreams which together create a dream of a family, a dream of a country and finally a dream of the whole humanity.” He explains how we are born into the outside dream and it creates our inside dream—what we believe or don’t believe, how we should be or not be, what is good or bad, right or wrong. My daughter’s insight made me realize that our power comes from our ability to know we are in a dream, and we can change the dream or enter a new one if we so choose.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the American Dream since I lost my home to foreclosure and thus lost a foundational foothold of the American Dream, homeownership. Historically homeownership has been the primary status symbol of prosperity. It’s a foundational reward for believing, doing, and being what society’s dream says you should. It separates the poor from the middle and upper class. From the frontier days to today, owning a home has been the cornerstone of prosperity. This is what led to the belief that housing values would never fall. How could they? The home and its value was the bedrock of an ever-expanding U.S. economy.
The root of the word dream is “deception” or “seek to harm.” It has linguistically evolved to encompass life’s hopes and aspirations, the possibilities of our imaginations to create, and then, ideally, to have access to the resources to bring those creations to fruition. The housing crisis was where these two aspects of the dream collided. Millions of people aspired to own a home and get their slice of the prosperity pie, and a system of loan brokers, investment bankers and home loan institutions willingly deceived people in order to get a bigger piece (or a whole pie) to themselves.
Despite this crisis, not much has changed. As the middle class shrinks and the gulf between the wealthy and poor grows, it becomes easier to see that we might just have our heads in the purple dream box my daughter drew on her white board. We are upside down unable to find a way out because we don’t realize we are in a dream. It feels real. It feels like “just the way things are” because we agree to it.
You know when you fall in a dream and you jolt yourself awake just before you hit bottom? That is where we are now in our collective dream. We are falling and it is our time to wake up and realize we are in a dream. A dream that we have the ability to change if we so chose. The burst of the housing bubble that sent 4.4 million (and counting) homes into foreclosure is the small opening my daughter spoke of. It is the opportunity to enter a new dream of what we want for ourselves individually and collectively.