We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

—William Shakespeare

It’s at the museum of photograph downtown, and we are looking at photos of people and things.

The past two days seem like a very long talk, talking about the stories of each other’s lives. Ease and openness communicates itself, and it’s like a mirror, your relaxation reflects back to you in the other person’s response.

Intimate human communication must feel like this, I think to myself, that it makes you feel free to throw off all the masks, the doubleness, the uniforms that are imposed on you, that it makes you feel free to be yourself instead of having to prove or justify yourself.

Then, as a word, a scene, a feeling comes back to me: maybe we but have made a little step. For it must be so difficult, that we all know, even the four-year-old little boy knows, that we are expected to be in certain ways by parents or peers or society, and maybe most of all, by ourselves.

The people, punks in the seventies and eighties in London and New York, look back at me in a defiant or nonchalant gaze. Their outfits too—persistently meant to astonish—are like a statement of their attitude towards life.

What make us put this dress or that clothes on?

What makes us, in life, do this and that?

If you think about it, the driven-force behind it all may be simply a thought, a dream, an idea of ourselves.

“Waiting for something to happen”, so the little singing girl married the big bluebeard. And I, like the person at this moment standing so close to me, have been urged on by a thought, a dream, an idea of life and myself, and, oh odds and chances, as if in a dream, here we are standing next to each other in a museum looking at photos.

梦想, the Chinese word for dream, is defined as such: dream is a kind of expectation for the future. It refers to the situation that thinking about the future in the present or a hope (an ambition, a goal in your heart) can be achieved but can only be achieved with hard work. Dream is a thing that makes you feel persistence is happiness, and dream can even be regarded as faith, a kind of belief.

梦, the first character, also means dream itself, is about a person sleeps under a roof in a bed in the night.

The original meaning of 梦, interestingly, is “not clear, blurry”, and its pronunciation is similar to 模糊 the word for “vague, dim”.

想, the second character, means to think and miss and envy; it means to hope and want and anticipate. 想 is, the ancient dictionary tells me, the eye sees and the heart wants.

How strange life is, that on the outskirt it’s built on such solid stuff: we eat our three meals; we put our clothes on; we sleep under a roof in a bed; we walk on the street and take the trains. Yet what chances, what images we have encountered on the way, what oddities that we should now, today put on this particular outfit, walk on this street, come to this museum and stand in front of these photos.

Yet—how I have wished we could dream together—we must carry on with our own dreams. And it’s with sprightliness we walk on. If there is a hint of sadness, it’s the sweet sort, knowing that the Perfect Day has been there and will be there, knowing that dreams have been and will be urging us on, and we have no choice but to be ourselves.