The Intersection of Hopes and Dreams

[Introduction:] "A familiar injunction is to follow your dreams. The motivation for such encouragement is presumably a commitment to the principle that people ought to follow their dreams. This principle, the dreams principle, as I call it, appears to have wide application, for we dream of many things. Some dreams are personal, like those to succeed in a profession or to become a parent. In other instances, however, we dream for grand socio-political ends. Martin Luther King Jr., for example, viewed such dreams as pivotal to the human condition. In his sermon, “Unfulfilled Dreams,” he began with an insight from King David’s failed dream to build a temple for the Hebrew people:

At so many points we start, we try, we set out to build our various temples. And I guess one of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable. We are commanded to do that. And so we, like David, find ourselves in so many instances having to face the fact that our dreams are not fulfilled. (2003, 192)

Famously, King dreamed that the United States would live up to its commitment to equality and justice. This dream was, and is, worth pursuing, despite the low odds of success. Furthermore, a striking feature of dreams is that their normative force seems, in part, to come from within the dream itself. As the second epigraph above illustrates, dreams are often experienced as calling us to ways of life."