The war in Ukraine has been going on for four years. The two nations, which were never originally prosperous, become utterly devastated. A country that wages war to fulfill the dreams of its own people and a country that responds with only the dream of merely existing all live with their own dreams.
I have trauma because of my parents, who are suffering from the trauma of the Korean War. In the cause and effect of everything, there is someone’s dream. Depending on the level of energy in concentration and action, someone’s dream may come true, or, through resonant energy, that dream may become impossible. I hope the dreams of people who can smile toward a peaceful world come true.
I showed an AI a blog post I wrote a long time ago, and mentioned the war in Ukraine and the war my parents went through. Artificial intelligence harshly points out the flawed flow of logic, but because of parents traumatized by war, it seemed to understand better than anyone the anxiety and lack I was harboring within me. According to statistics, the number one purpose for people who use artificial intelligence is things like psychological counseling.
Dreams Come True — On the Image
Children are full of dreams, and their dreams are, for the most part, honored. There is still enough time left for them to come true. An old man's dreams, by contrast, are dismissed — by others, and often by himself — for the opposite reason: too little time remains. But it is not right that a person's entire subjective universe should collapse simply because there is no longer time to translate an idea into something real, to give a dream its shape in the world. Look closely at the relationship between dream and reality and you find that what matters is not the achieved dream but the sustained thought and effort of trying to achieve it — that is what moves the world forward. Idea and reality are not as cleanly separated as we assume. Slowly or quickly, the idea is already, diligently, being carried out upon the real. Once you understand this, you also understand that with enough time nothing in this world is beyond reach — and how hollow it is to remain in mere fantasy instead. If there is something to be gained or accomplished, the work is simple to state, if not to do: take the blocks of thought and action stacked up in the realm of the idea, and keep moving them, one by one, onto the ground of the actual.
The French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) held that human perception takes in only the information an object offers that is useful for action, and assembles that into what he called an Image. The world we see, in other words, is a world already filtered down to what we need. But this is not a claim that the world itself is shaped by our wishing. Bergson never said the world is made of our dreams — he said that the world we inhabit, the subjective universe we walk into each morning, is composed differently depending on what we have kept looking at, kept holding onto. What changes the world is not thought by itself, but thought that sets a direction, and action repeated in that direction. Put more precisely: the world is not made of dreams. The world I live in is made along the trajectory of the dream I have refused to put down.
I have, at times, watched closely the world of people who have lived for a long time inside scarcity. Frequent conflict. No slack. A short fuse over small things. At first I took this for temperament, or for a failure of upbringing. Only after watching for a long while did I understand otherwise. It was not a defect of character but the sheer weight of deprivation itself. A mind that has already spent nearly everything it has on getting through the day, and on carrying an old wound, has nothing left over to picture a distant future or organize daily life toward it. Whether the deprivation comes from war, from poverty, or from loss repeated too many times, it physically narrows a person's field of view. To scold that narrowed sight for lacking dreams is not so different from asking someone drowning why they cannot swim better. What someone who grew up beside that narrowness often carries instead, quietly, for a long time, is the unglamorous work of widening — in their own lifetime — the field of view they inherited.
But it turned out the real beggars were elsewhere. Beside those who possess neither wealth nor comfort and still keep walking toward a dream, there are others who, lacking for nothing, obtain power through every manner of elevated begging, and then use that power to extinguish the dreams other people hold dear before they can become real. Call this the new-age beggar. Poverty is not only material. Whoever seizes or wields power without paying a fair price for it is a beggar too. When someone has gotten what they wanted but the manner of getting it, and the conduct that follows, keep looking threadbare from every angle — that is because, seen from any angle, it is still the posture of a beggar. A political leader worth the name does not look at people who want a decent welfare and see beggars; the leader's task is to build the ground on which those people can widen their own narrowed view and reach their dreams. And yet, with enough time passed, it has often turned out that the real beggars were not the people asking for that ground, but those who privatized it.
This is the landscape of the war between Russia and Ukraine that has continued since 2022. An idea held for decades by one man — who once stood on the front line of the Cold War as an intelligence officer, watching an empire collapse without being able to stop it — has finally, after passing through decades of time, been carried over into the actual acts of a state. His dream was already complete long ago, written in the language of confrontation and spheres of influence; time merely waited for the chance to move it onto the ground of the real. On the other side stand tens of millions holding a far more modest dream: simply to go on existing, not to disappear. The dream to destroy comes true. The dream to endure also comes true. Which one prevails depends on which side carries its idea onto the real longer, and more steadily. In the end, the idea is always carried over onto the real. The only real questions are what that idea is, and who is willing to hold onto it long enough.
