Years ago, a friend of mine sold me a Maltese Falcon. He claimed that it was one of the handful from the movie The Maltese Falcon. For me, it is a treasured artifact. You will note that it is gold. My friend said it was the only gold one. However, it isn’t made of gold; someone years ago painted it. I don’t remember what his explanation was for the gold color of the falcon.

It should be noted that I only had to pay my friend $50, which seemed strange to me. I have wondered whether my Maltese Falcon was from that movie or not. The fact that another falcon was sold at auction for $4 million raises questions about the authenticity of my gold Maltese Falcon.

The Maltese Falcon was a famous film noir movie that was released in 1941. Humphrey Bogart played Sam Spade, a private detective, looking for several gangsters attempting to steal the priceless statue of the Maltese Falcon.

What is fascinating is that while the book, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, was the basis for the film, the book doesn’t contain the famous one-liner that Bogart utters, “The stuff that dreams are made of.”

So, who came up with that one-liner? Bogart, himself. Bogart suggested simplifying this line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” That is truly intriguing. Why did Bogart even know that line from The Tempest?

Regardless, I’m into dreaming, also. Bobby Kennedy gave my generation in the 60s during the civil rights movement a mindset about dreaming. “Some men see things as they are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say, why not.” He taught us to dream dreams as we faced problems like racism and poverty. To Bobby’s credit, he was able to speak to whites and blacks about racism. Millions of whites joined the civil rights movement in the 60s due to him.

Bobby was in Indianapolis, IN, getting ready to speak to a black crowd when one of his staff told him that Martin Luther King had just been assassinated. Listen and watch as Bobby took on the task to address the crowd regarding the killing of King. He understood their pain, because he experienced it.

Bobby was the most important mentor in my life. This is an example of my dreaming dreams. This is a photo that represents one of my dreams. I wanted to create a small utopian experiment near a lake surrounded by mountains.

My dream looks like this.

It would include people throughout the world who helped me on my journey down the yellow brick road of life. Some lived in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and America. However, I didn’t possess the money, other resources, and means to make that utopian dream come true. That dream was dashed.

I needed to lessen my grandiose dream, so I did. I decided to raise $50,000 for 1250 laptops for the schools that my three grandchildren attended in Myanmar. In the midst of dreaming, I realized that I needed to improve the Internet reception, which added to the cost, along with other technical issues. However, I failed to raise that much money. That was another dashed dream.

So, I resigned to deal with just my family that lives near Inle Lake. I would do everything possible to assist them on their yellow brick road of life. Additionally, I mentioned in my previous essay that my family took me to Set Set Yo on our family tour together on my third trip to Myanmar. There I met my great-granddaughter, A Ngal Lay.

I love my family and will do whatever I can to help them. When I was a child, my father used a phrase when he was describing facing a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. He would say about something he was facing that he would address the problem by saying, “come hell or high water.” It is critical to dream and to face the problems. Dreaming won’t always be realized; that is a given. Yet, dreaming is critical to a life well-lived.

A half-century ago, Abba released I Have a Dream. Watch the video of Abba. While the lyrics might seem a bit dated, the meaning remains...dream on.

Listen particularly to two couplets of the song. There is a tension between dreaming and the darkness and the dreaming.

The Abba ends with this couplet.