Yet to Understand Society, You Only Had to Look at Its Dreams

To be fooled in every venture we begin
Is the unfailing fate of us all
In the morning I devise brilliant schemes
And all day long I play the fool
-Voltaire

Yet to Understand Society, You Only Had to Look at Its Dreams

I love talking to people about their dreams. Dreams are a utopia, a parallel universe rescued from all the reality of life, from the daily rush, from all that trouble and grief. Because dreams are the place where, as Edip Cansever says in his poem ‘Masa da Masaymış Ha’ (‘Some Table, That’), people put on the table whatever it is they want to do. Like a cloudless July evening. Dreams are the place where the stars are so bright and so close, the place where the stronger your dreams, the closer you can get to the stars. Talking to people about their dreams is like discovering all these hidden paradises. Like going back, years later, to the neighborhood you were born and raised in and drinking tea at its coffeehouse.

There are a few reasons I want to talk to people about their dreams. The first is my desire to reach people’s true identity. The shortest way to understand today’s people, backs bent by everyday troubles and problems, who, never mind dreaming, haven’t even managed to create a decent living space for themselves, is to talk with them about their dreams. It’s actually as simple as a scratch-off card you can buy for 1 lira from a street vendor on your way: discovering the millions that may lie beneath that worthless piece of paper. As long as you want to scratch that surface. Believe me, you’ll find far more underneath than you expect.

Another reason is the chance to reach, in just a few minutes, many details about a person, from their dreams to their vision and their worldview. I want to share an anecdote on this. I believe military service is of great importance for a person’s personal growth and for developing their worldview. If we set aside the sterile debates about whether military service is necessary, from birth until we go off to the army, we all grow up among people of more or less the same income level and the same level of education. Even though people may think otherwise, this holds true for university years too. Look back at your friends from university and you’ll easily see it. But when you go into the army, things take a somewhat different turn. You start living alongside people you’ve never been together with before. You observe in astonishment that society isn’t actually what you thought it was, how different people’s mindsets can be, how people can remain so far removed from education. You see that people don’t know what the capital of Turkey is, how natural many behaviors that society frowns upon today seem to them, how isolated your own lifestyle actually is. You understand much better, by talking to the people there, why the ruling party won again in Reyhanlı in the elections held after the bombing there. It’s there that you realize how far apart what you see from behind a desk, in front of a screen, and the reality actually are.

Coming to where military service meets dreams: whenever I had the chance, I talked with my fellow soldiers about their dreams, asked them where they saw themselves in 5 years. Because the answers I got brought me a little closer to understanding the society I live in. I’d like to tell you about one of them: Özgür was a friend of mine, a high school graduate who, because of some family problems, had gotten used to the streets from an early age, prone to crime, without the faintest idea about Turkey’s capital or its President. It was the first time I’d met someone like him, and I always wanted to try to understand him instead of judging him. One day, in another one of our conversations, I asked Özgür about his dream. He straightened up in his chair, cleared his throat; I was seeing Özgür so serious for the first time. Bro, he said, after my military service is over I’m going to work really hard, I mean if I have to I won’t eat or drink, I’ll work day and night and buy a Doğan, he said, I’ll have the windows tinted black, and I’ll take the girls out for rides, he said. That’s my biggest dream. I’m going to do it no matter what!

My aim here is by no means to look down on any group, to belittle Özgür’s dreams or to glorify my own. When you start to understand people’s dreams, you start to understand society too. Starting to understand different mindsets, the existence of people who think differently from you, what the individuals who make up society fundamentally want, is a factor that will lift you up not only in your daily life but also in your work life. So ask people about their dreams as much as you can. Try to understand them; believe me, the more you do this, the more livable the world becomes.

You can follow me on Twitter: @MarketingHolmes