‘You may say I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one’

So wrote John Lennon and Yoko Ono for the song ‘Imagine’.

Aren’t we all dreamers, deep down? We all have aspirations. We may hold these dreams close; quietly long to do something or have something. Or we may try to make our dreams come true.

The latter requires a good deal of courage. Take writing, for example. ‘I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all,’ said the author E.B. White. It is one thing to dream of writing, but quite another to actually write, to put the pen to the paper and form the words; and if that requires courage, then imagine how much bravery one needs in order to publish that writing.

In my novel Aphrodite’s Tears, my heroine Oriel has closed off her heart. Her fiancé fell in love with her best friend and left her. She met a man and shared a night of passion with him, but in the morning her Greek god was gone. She promised herself then that she would never let any man abandon her again. Better to be alone than hurt, she decided; safer that way.

But then she takes a job supervising an archaeological exploration on the island of Helios, and discovers that her new employer is none other than the Greek god who used her and then left her all those years ago. He is just as handsome and charismatic as she remembered, but she is a different woman now, she tells herself; she will not fall for him.

Damian, meanwhile, has cause to be cautious also. It is true that he abandoned her that night, but for a good reason: he found out that Oriel was engaged to be married and thought that she was being unfaithful. In fact, Oriel’s engagement had been broken off by the time she met Damian, but he did not realise that. A man of honour and tradition, he did not want to be ‘the other man’. Now, though, he wonders whether he was too hasty in his judgement; he wonders whether he should have let Oriel go after all.

Fear is what holds them both back, fear of a dream being shattered. Dreams are precious; they define and sustain us. The thought of a dream not working out… it’s enough to make one not even strive for the dream, but to hide it away.

W.B. Yeats wrote a beautiful poem on this theme entitled ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’:

Had I the heaven’s 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.

Whatever our dream is, we need others to tread softly around it, because the dream is so precious to us.

On the island of Helios, Damian and Oriel need to find the courage to unlock their hearts. But more than that, they need to be respectful and compassionate with each other – to tread softly, for they tread on each other’s dreams.

* In case you are wondering, the inspiration here is the famous story of Sir Walter Raleigh laying his cloak over a mud puddle for Queen Elizabeth I to walk upon.