Dreams and choruses.

I envy people whose dreams can be embodied physically, as if by translating hopes and aspirations into tangible terms, it somehow makes it that much more real. More viable.

Even though the song in your head is always better than the song that you strum. Even though the image in your head is always more beautiful than the one you paint. Even when the story in your head speaks so much more than the manuscript in your hand…

I think art-as-expression isn’t really about focusing your essence onto your chosen medium, but rather the physical embodiment of trying to clasp that unreachable dream. Like that familiar song just out of earshot, unknown and untouchable.

I almost hear that sometimes. That song. My mind tells me that it’s unknown, my rationality tells me that there is no music playing, but yet I almost hear it, and it sounds so familiar. And not in an esoteric sense, but in a real, tangible, profoundly literal sense.

I’d like to think I’m almost hearing that chorus of angels singing.

I remember: it was Easter Vigil service about 10 years ago, when suddenly while singing the Gloria, I heard a chorus of voices suddenly join into the song. An ethereal chorus that somehow filled the church and echoed like a million voices down the hallways of time. Utterly beautiful and somehow hauntingly at the edge of my awareness. Complimenting the singing and somehow expanding it. And then it was gone, and I heard the choir and the voices of the persons beside me once more.

I’ve never heard that chorus again.

But dreams, like successes, seem to be measured only by the substance of their reality. We seem to assume that existing is better than not existing (I think it was Anslem who said it?). That ideas in the material world are far better than chasing the dreams in your head; and in a purely practical sense, they would be right.

And somehow I seem to struggle to express my dreams in material terms. Every word I write only relevant for that single moment of creation, yet immediately failing to capture that meaning in its entirety. I suppose that’s why I am rather verbose, and I thank you for even reading this far.

Frustratingly, I find myself unable to even express those dreams. It’s like in One Tree Hill when Lucas hands his manuscript to Glenda. The physical embodiment of a dream created in ink and thought and paper. Some days I wish that was me with that manuscript.

But that is not still not the sum of my dreams.

I envy people who have the knowledge and capability and sheer strength of will to create their dreams in the material world. Some days I fear I have not the courage. Some days I fear that those dreams are too inherently intangible to materialise.