Is Dreaming Planning?

We’re back from an unexpected summer hiatus with a piece I wrote, mostly for myself, back in autumn 2020 when I was falling in love.

This quote made the rounds last summer [2020] as police brutality, pandemic weariness, and a lack of social safety nets pushed us to think deeply about the kind of world we want to live in. Steinem is highlighting the importance of asking what it might look like to imagine a life outside of a limited set of options that revolve around work, a family, monogamy, and capitalist consumption. “Dreaming is planning” understands the connection between imagination and reality and means asking questions about what the future could hold for us outside of our preset options. In working to create a new world, we first have to imagine it. We have to ask ourselves what a world without police might look like, ask ourselves how we want to love, how we want to create, and to see this imaginal process not as frivolous but as a brave and crucial step in shifting the world.

Filmmaker and activist Tourmaline calls this “freedom dreaming”¹. But in subtle contrast to Steinem, Tourmaline’s dreaming is not just about the future (planning). It takes place in the present. It is a practice of “notic[ing] how much I am already surrounded by the world I dream of”. Similarly, David Graeber writes, “direct action is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free”². These thinkers follow a long tradition of believing that the future already (and perhaps only) exists in the present. Dreaming in the present means bringing your attention to the ways in which dreaming is not quite planning, in which dreaming means acting with openness towards the now and future world.

I find this most beautifully expressed in the way Celine Sciamma, director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, describes her relationship with actress Adele Haenel. Sciamma explains to Vanity Fair³ how their relationship is constantly shifting, a source of both stability and “emancipation”. When asked about whether the two would continue to make films together in the future, she responded,

“You don’t have to dream”.

You don’t have to plan.

You can trust that the future will be more than any plan you could have conjured.

The kind of dreaming that Sciamma does not engage in is the kind of dreaming or planning that limits, that tries to tell the future what it can be. Sciamma is freedom dreaming in the present, living as if she were already in the world she wants to inhabit.

Dreaming as planning is useful as a practice of seeing that you have more options than you thought, for opening up more possibility in the physical world.

But each of us is one person dreaming, living in a universe of many, bodies and dreams bleeding into one another.

It takes many to make a moment, and you, the dreamer, are only one. It takes two or more, plus the piers, plus the night sky, the lights across the water, the group of salsa dancers that you didn’t expect to show up, the maracas, the wine, one of you knowing the steps, the two different songs wheeling around and underneath each other, the unexpected joy of a city still alive and finding new ways to be, living new present dreams.

You are only one part of this picture, so how could you dream it? Your job is to be open, to not limit the world’s possibilities, to be a collaborator. To put your hands in the stream without trying to hold the water. To dance with the limits of imagination as something to be both pushed against and embraced as that which makes collaboration possible.

Tourmaline writes, “freedom dreams are born when we face harsh conditions not with despair, but with the deep knowledge that these conditions will change— that a world filled with softness and beauty and care is not only possible, but inevitable”. This “deep knowledge” is the kind of trust that Sciamma has in Haenel. A trust in one person that can be extended to trust in the world and in the future.

[1]. Tourmaline. “Filmmaker and Activist Tourmaline on How to Freedom Dream”. Vogue, July 2, 2020. https://www.vogue.com/article/filmmaker-and-activist-tourmaline-on-how-to-freedom-dream

[2]. Stuart Jeffries. “David Graeber interview: ‘So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary’”. The Guardian, March 21, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/21/books-interview-david-graeber-the-utopia-of-rules

[3]. Julie Miller. “Portrait of a Lady on Fire: The Real-Life Love Story Behind the Scorching Film”. Vanity Fair, February 14, 2020. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/02/portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire