Perhaps it is because I am grown old but I am wary of men with dreams.

I know dreams are normally presented as positive things that uplift the spirit and enrich lives. We encourage children not just to dream but to follow their dreams to find happiness.

I don’t see dreams or dreamers this way. In my experience, most dreams are a temporary escape from reality, pleasant but unrealistic, That’s what makes them dreams. Most of us take what comfort we can from the momentary relief and move on, dealing with what’s in front of us as best we can.

The people who worry me are the ones who not only hold on to their dreams but who work to make them my reality. These are the ideologues. The true believers. The ones who know they are right. The ones determined to change a world that they see as theirs but which I know is ours.

They worry me because they live in a dream, a delusion that they are determined to make the rest of us accept as reality. To be a Dreamer is to be a denier of any reality that challenges the dream. If a Dreamer has power they will use it to achieve their dream partly by silencing those who voice inconvenient truths.

They worry me because so many of their dreams are nightmares that others pay the price for. These are the Dreamers who dream of the glory of a Brexit Britain, of making America Great Again, of replacing democracy with an oligarchy of billionaires, of building walls to keep migrants out, of letting pandemics and climate change ‘thin the herd’

The dreams they dream are a contagion, a forest fire, a tidal wave that they surf while we drown.

These kinds of Dreamers are not new. We saw them in the first half of the last century when their dreams killed millions.

D. H. Lawrence lived through some of the nightmares those Dreamers pulled us into. I wonder if they were who he had in mind when he wrote his poem, ‘Dreams‘. Read it and see what you think.