My song today is ‘Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream’). This song was written by Cindy Walker and was first recorded and released by Roy Orbison as a non-album single in 1962. It was a big international hit for Orbison, where it reached Number 2 in both the Australian and the ‘U.K. Singles Charts’. It also reached Number 4 in the U.S. ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart besides being a top ten hit in Canada and Norway. Five months later, ‘Dream Baby’ was included on Orbison's ‘Greatest Hits’ compilation LP.
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My mother was the best dreamer I ever knew; not because she ever realised her dreams, but because she was aware of the connection that exists between dreaming and having hope for the future; in the belief of better days to come. My mother knew that even when you do not get what you want, it nevertheless remains important to continue dreaming in the hope that one day you might!
We all have dreams. Maybe yours is to be the best at something in school or at work or to succeed at a sport or some other passion and skill you possess. Perhaps your dream is to travel somewhere in the world that you’ve been thinking about for years now or to improve your financial situation, increase your social skills, or to get your body back into great shape. It might be finding that special person who will become your better half and make your life complete or experiencing that unique pleasure of parenting your first child or stepping inside your first marital home.
If you are presently unemployed and are living on the bread line with more debts than assets, and aggravated by a sufficient absence of hope to make you feel depressed, (worse still suicidal), you will probably think that dreaming is for fools only. If you are being evicted from your home because financial circumstances prevent you paying the mortgage/rent any longer, and you and your partner and your three frustrated children are obliged to eat, sleep and live in a single hotel room that is paid for by the DHSS, it is no surprise if your mind is focussed solely on the reality of your dire situation and not on dreams.
If you are a serving soldier abroad and become an amputee after a bomb explosion and lose both legs, it will be hard for you to initially dream of ever been able to walk on false legs but will be crucially important of you to dream of doing so if you are one day to do so. If you live in a war-torn country and have no prospects of food, work, freedom or even continued life, and you outlay every penny you possess to pay illegal people smugglers to help you cross dangerous waters in unsuitable and overcrowded watercraft with your wife and children, sometimes the only thing you have to hang on to when the waves threaten to capsize your sea craft and sink you and your family beneath the waves is your dream of seeing a foreign shore. Perhaps, seeing the white cliffs of Dover is the one dream that represents peace, hope, and prosperity for you and your loved ones?
During more recent times since the pandemic virus, Covid-19 has locked down the world and restricted the freedom, harmed the health, and threatened the security of our former lives, the dreams of many have been shattered. Being furloughed for four months from a job you held for thirty years, and then finding oneself unemployed because the country’s economic downtown has forced your firm to close down or severely cut back on its workforce is devastating. There are many people like my wife (a former yoga instructor) who lost their business and prime source of income because of the lockdown, and because they are unlikely to be ever able to revive that same business which took ten years to gradually build up, their future financial security is more precarious than ever.
Such uninvited change is hard to come to terms with for anyone. Worse still have been brides and grooms unable to marry as planned during this pandemic lockdown; the fathers unable to witness the births of their offspring in maternity theatres, and family members and close friends not being allowed to hold the hand of a dying relative or loved one in their hospital bed as they lay drew their last breath; and then, even being denied attendance at their funeral service and burial! Not forgetting of course those elderly parents or lifelong spouses who live in Old Folk’s Homes who could not be visited by their family due to Lockdown, and especially those with illnesses or dementia. So many people must have felt abandoned in their hour of need!
Then, there are those people who have cancer; and even some little children with terminal illnesses who have not yet had the opportunity to step out of their nappies or set foot beyond their front doors. Imagine being the parent of a boy child who you know will never grow into their first pair of long trousers or a girl child who will never bring home their first spotty-faced boyfriend for her parents to approve of or have her father proudly walk her down the aisle on her wedding day. Imagine dreaming of one day becoming a proud mother and incurring half a dozen miscarriages or being told that you can never give birth to a child?
I recognise that sometimes, one’s hurtful and awful circumstances and daily experiences make it hard to dream, and even harder if you do dream, to keep your dream alive. I am not so unrealistic to imagine the difficulty in sometimes people being able to see any positive purpose in dreaming, but based upon mine and my mother’s experiences, I still believe in its importance in one’s overall state of happiness of ‘dreaming’.
Throughout my childhood years, whenever I walked one mile down ‘Hightown New Road’ from Windybank Estate to Cleckheaton with my mother, we would admire the lovely houses and cottages we passed along the way. ‘Hightown New Road’ was the ‘posh’ side of Hightown, and its house occupants were mostly doctors, solicitors, headmasters, and business owners. All house occupants down ‘Hightown New Road’ and their families lived luxuriously in the newest and most expensive properties for twenty miles. They wanted for nothing and their halls were larger than our house lounge.
Halfway down ‘Hightown New Road’ was a small cottage which had stood there fifty years longer than the larger and more modern houses that surrounded it. The front door to the cottage was framed in a porch of red roses (my mother’s favourite flower); not too dissimilar to that of a traditional cottage that a wealthier Irish person might have owned when my mother lived in Ireland.
Not once did mum and I ever pass this cottage without my mother saying, “One day, Billy, I’ll buy that cottage and live in it!” We both knew that unless my mum won the football pools or my father struck gold nuggets down the coal pit he worked at that, her dream home would not come true. But here is the thing! My mother lived and died with her dream, and the mere having it was as important to her ongoing happiness more than the fact than it was ever likely to be realised. Her dream was never fulfilled, but neither was it ever abandoned, and I genuinely believe that the mere holding of that dream made her life all the happier during the long days she worked throughout the week as the mother of seven children, doing whatever was required to feed, nourish and care for us.
What makes me say this is that each time we passed the house (twice or more weekly), my mum would always speak the same words to me. She would always say, “One day, Billy, I’ll buy that cottage and live in it!”; and she would smile broadly each time she told me. These words were never spoken by her in a tone of regret. No! She held on to her dream with a smile of happiness that lit up her face, even though deep down, we both knew that she would never own that cottage, except in her dreams.
As Oscar Wilde once said, (I paraphrase) “A dreamer is one who can only find their way by moonlight, and their punishment is that they can also see the dawn before the rest of the world.” When my mother went to bed at night, she would always dream about being the owner of her dream cottage, even though that she knew when the dawn came, she would still be living in our family council house on Windybank Estate.
My mother knew deep down all of her life that she would always live in a rented council-owned property. I am not the type of man to harbour regrets, but if I ever allowed myself to have one regret in my life, I have no doubt what it would be. It would be never having possessed enough money to buy my mother the cottage of her dreams. I do have a dream though that I know has already come true concerning my mother. I believe that she is presently living in the most heavenly dream cottage imaginable and looks down on all her seven children daily.
Love and peace Bill xxx