Make Time for Dreaming

I’m reading an amazing and moving memoir by Madeleine L’Engle called The Summer of Great-Grandmother. Therein is a tiny childhood story about poppies—it’s perfect to remind you of the necessity to make time for dreaming.

When Madeleine was twelve years old, she attended boarding school for the first time, and was thrust brutally out of the dream world she’d thrived in up until then. The sudden rule-driven atmosphere with no time for dreaming or creativity was a huge wound. Here’s how she and a clever fellow student made up for it: (Pardon the long quotation, but it is all so good, I just had to share it!)

They were assigned Victory Garden plots. Madeleine was number 97 at school—she and number 96 were paired up for the project.

We were allowed to bring the produce of our gardens in for tea, so most girls grew lettuce, tomatoes, radishes, and cress. 96 and I planted poppies. Nothing but poppies.

It was possible when I was twelve to be considerably more naïve and innocent about drugs than it is today. All we knew was that opium comes from poppies, and we knew this because our illicit reading included Bulldog Drummond and Fu Manchu. From these paperback books, which we kept hidden in our blazer pockets to read when we got sent from the classroom, we learned that opium produces beautiful dreams. So 96 and I ate poppy-seed sandwiches, poppy-flower sandwiches, poppy-leaf sandwiches, and went to bed every night with our dream books and flashlights under our pillows. My dream book has been lost somewhere, but I am still grateful for it. I soon learned that poppy sandwiches weren’t needed to induce dreams, but they did serve to give me an awareness that the waking world isn’t all there is.

If we had been allowed more time for daytime dreaming, for excursions into the world of imagination, if we had been allowed time for what George MacDonald calls holy idleness, we would not have had to depend on our nighttime dreams. But holy idleness would not have been tolerated in that school, and any attempt to search for it was considered wicked and immoral. “What! Daydreaming again, Madaleen? You’ll never get anywhere that way.”

Where did Matron want me to go? Our civilization was rushing toward the devastation of the Second World War; the clouds were visible on the horizon, and my parents saw them, even if Matron didn’t; and yet in school we were being taught to live in a climate where it is assumed that man is in control of the universe, and that he is capable of understanding and solving all problems by his own effort and virtue.

What 96 and I were doing with our dream books was instinctively rejecting this false illusion, refusing to think that our whole self is limited to that very small fragment of self which we can know, control, and manipulate; that very small fragment of self over which we have power.

At that time the two worlds lay side by side for me; the imaginary world in which I had been moving was just behind me; I was still fending off the limited finite world of school with stolen moments of dreaming and writing. I had yet to learn that the two worlds should not be separated. Growing up is a journey into integration. Separation is disaster.

Belle, as seen in Book 2: brought to life by Aisha Zaleha Latip

Perhaps this story from The Summer of the Great-Grandmother goes a good way to explain why we must continue, as adults, to give our imagination free reign—to dwell in places like the Neverland, maybe even with our very-own-fairies—then to use the wings given us to bring more freedom and beauty into the “real” world.

Hopefully I’ve reminded you of the wealth Madeleine L’Engle’s books offer—both her fiction and her nonfiction. Grab one of her titles this week, and make time for dreaming!

Happy Reading!