LEGO AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF DREAMS

We all are dreamers! This is the truest of the many truths floating in the different schools of thought and ideologies around. No man; however hopeless, however blind, however restless and miserable, however comfortable, however blessed and whatever cloud-level of happiness he is, doesn’t dream. Next to life, dreams; in all its variations, contextual functions and part of speech, gives value to the very essence for which a man lives.

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“Dreams are the subconscious habituation of a framework of the existential manifestation of the activities and in-activities of man, the cognitive clockwork action of the human mind, the engraining of desires, wishes, ambitions and aspirations”

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A dream is a location, a place the mind goes to, in search of escape, refuge and succor. A dream is the palette of imaginations, adventures as conceived and perceived, an animation of fantasies, ecstasies and everything in between the far, yet near lines of heaven and hell. A dream is where a man can be everything he wants to be.

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To be a dreamer in a world where living is fazed with an endless siege and a barrage of disasters, is as hard as living through the fogs that beclouds living. To live; and that in the harshest of conditions like a seed planted on a rocky path, deprived of the nourishment of all that brings about growth and fruition as is the way with the youths of Africa, maybe worse for the Nigerian youths. To dare to dream is to brave the worst of perils for the sheer fulfilment of ambition and adventure, to bring such dreams to reality is to become a god in the hardest way humanly possible.

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There’s something about dreams, it is relative to persons. In a way, we can say, a dream has life and that life is the life of the person that dreams it. Invariably, a dream has a soul that feels every of the emotion the dreamer feels. The hurts, the thrills, the disappointments and fulfilments, the mishaps and all that misshape and malign the life of a dreamer, shape-shifts the architecture of a dream too.

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Dreams are made of bricks, not the concrete type however. Dreams are made from something more distinctive in terms of flexibility, something plastic, that when it passes through fire, it melts, through the brazen cold of life, it breaks, though it be a towering wall, it crashes under the weight of the storm and worse when the hurricanes hit.

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Dreams are made of bricks, not the concrete type, the walls of dreams are made from the plastic bricks of the childhood mansions and castles we built as kids; Legos. Bridges, terraces, porches and the penthouse of the luxuries of dreams are built with these plastic molds.

The Nigerian dream however is made from the least quality of plastics, breakable by mere breeze, crushable like twigs under a toddler’s foot and that an average Nigerian youth is not as lucky to erect his dreams (palace and empires) on the sturdy, firm fringes of a solid foundation and build on it, expounds the ill-luck of Nigerian youth.

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We all are dreamers, pilgrims journeying from our nightmarish lives to the comfort and splendor built with plastic bricks somewhere in the hanging universe we escape to when the need to escape becomes imperative and for some, actualizing these dreams becomes possible when all parts fit like a puzzle, when the ground on which the dream seed is sown nourishes the seed, when the foundation upon which the bricks are laid becomes an anchor that holds the bricks in place for when the storms come and the floods hit, when the constructs of timing, of placement and all the stars align to give light to the dreamscape

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Hitherto, if we are brave enough to dare to dream, despite the flawed architecture of our placement and the brittle and fickle nature of the Nigerian dream, we can muster the courage to find our lights from within and be the lights for others, chip and chisel parts till it fits, fertilize our dreams with effort, bury our roots deep in the cores of the ground and let our grits steady our dreams, weather storms and rebuild each time the floods tear us down and create a world where dreaming becomes the reality of happiness, fulfilment and actualizing these dreams a possibility for all that dreams.