…AND SO WE DREAM

(From the Editor's Note, "From the Editor, of the upcoming October issue of Sense&Style)

What if you lived on a small, empty island, where the only visible sign of a larger life is a faint mountain silhouette on the far horizon? What if you lived in the slums, where the spectacle from your window is a panorama of rusty, makeshift rooftops, tucked into place by old tires? What if you lived in a box, where there are no sights to explore, no smells to discover, no flavors to unravel, no mysteries to untangle?

You open an atlas, you dream over a map, you repeat the glorious names of unknown cities. —Joseph Kessel

Then you dream. You focus on that pale shadow on the other side of the deep, blue sea, conjuring up images of great, seemingly implausible things. You keep your head above the vista of poverty, wondering what other worlds must exist under the same blue skies and cotton clouds overhead. You retreat into your inner world, inhabited by bizarre beings, the creatures of your imagination, the magic of your inventions.
That’s the power of dreams. Unlike most of the other things we value, they cannot be bought. They do not care whether we are rich or poor, dumb or smart, strong or weak. They cannot be locked up in a safe or stripped of their right to exist, that is, without our consent.
Dreams, I believe, are the reason we all start out in this world as children, who, despite the nagging of the grownups around us, spend our first many years on earth refusing to recognize lack, limitation, boundaries, or even danger. In the world of a child, a discarded tin can on the street is enough to stimulate the mind, to unleash the spirit, to make the heart go pitter-patter with infinite possibilities. It is so when the passage of time has turned us into adults, indoctrinated in the irrefutable science of cause and effect, the unassailable difference between fact and fiction, we can always draw from our childhood a certain power to “shoot rubberbands at the stars,” to borrow a phrase from Edie Brickel.
In this issue, in which we hope to invoke all the forces of the universe to turn our highest aspirations to reality, we turn to dreamers and doers like Tetchie Agbayani (“Steward of Futures,” page 132), who has quietly left the limelight to lead a quiet yet more meaningful life, guiding the youth by the hand on the path to an empowered future. The future, yet the great unknown, is also what feeds Mercedes Lopez Vargas’ dreams (“The Lopez Legacy,” page 126), although her path compels her to turn back time, if only to help history catch up with the present and lead the way. In a world obsessed with speed, Maia Yulo La’O (“Where Dreams Dwell,” page 122), along with her family, is slowing things down in a country estate, which, once consigned to the realm of dreams, has now become reality even for the city-bound, replete with ducks gliding on ponds and tall trees flirting with the sun. Our cover girl, Heart Evangelista (“Heart, Wind, & Fire,” page 114), after having devoted many years of her young life to the public eye, had to slow down, too, to discover the joys of living her life according to the dictates of her heart.
In these pages, there are many ways by which we can view possibilities in our mind’s eye, whether in the language of REM (“The Science of Sleep,” page 82) or in the guise of odd warnings or danger signs (“Lost in a Dream,” page 75). But dreams in order to be powerful have to come in the form of strong visuals, vivid images, compelling pictures. No matter how impossible it seems, if you can see it clearly, every tinge of color, every curve, chances are it will soon become reality. Imagination, not necessity, is the mother of invention. After all, before the submarine was invented for practical purposes, didn’t French novelist Jules Verne dream it up first, seeing it so clearly in his mind that he wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea to describe it?

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