"To boldly go where no one has gone before." 

--Jean Luc Picard

It's September 28, 1987.  My mother and brother and I sat and watched our 19" television light up with a brand new version of the USS Enterprise, complete with a Klingon security officer named Worf, an android named Data (fitting), a mind-reading counselor, the dude from Reading Rainbow, and a bald-headed captain with a French name...Jean Luc Picard.  In true modernist fashion, "where no man" has been changed to "where no one."  Ok....

I grew up watching reruns of TOS, or The Original Series.  Kirk. Spock. McCoy. Chekov. Sulu. Scottie.  Uhuru.  But what I saw that night early in my freshman year was light-years ahead of anything Gene Roddenberry put on the screen back in 1966.  The music was better. The effects were better.  The acting was better.  The storylines were way better.  But one thing was the same:  they both absolutely captured my imagination like all science-fiction does because they were both about what might be possible.  

I'm a dreamer.  Always have been.  I guess it began when I used to dream my dad would come back.  Been dreaming that for 42 years now, and I guess I will always dream, or hope, to see him again one day. 

I think that mankind has always known there is something more out there...something more than we can experience with our five senses.  I think we, as a species, innately know that there is something beyond this life.  I think it's part of our mass consciousness.  I think it's been in us since creation.  Adam and Eve knew they were immortal.  And I also believe they knew they lost immortality, at least in a sense, and I believe that we've been searching for it since the Fall.  The Holy Grail.  The Fountain of Youth.  Shangri-La.  On and on the myths go that speak to what we all know: there is something beyond all this.  

So back to Star Trek....

Do not all the great TV shows in a way take us away from the mundane, boring, ugly, white-knuckle existence that is daily life as an adult and place us into a world of fantasy?  We're all seeking an escape: an escape into a world that is better than the one in which we currently live.  A world in which that which we dream of most actually happens.  A world in which there's enough food.  Where people don't die too soon.  Where relationships don't end.  Where we can make anything we want to happen, happen.  And regardless of the characters, the sets, the costumes...the metaphors are all the same.  They all represent the possible.

C.S. Lewis once told his niece that she'd one day be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.  My question is "why'd we ever stop???"  

Why would we ever, for any reason, stop dreaming????

As we grow up, we are told to stop daydreaming. We are told to think more concretely.  We are told to...grow up.  Ironically, when we reach a certain age, we want to be a child again.  In fact, we'd give just about anything to be a child again.  I think it's because when we were children, anything was possible, at least in our minds.  But then middle school and high school happen, and physics happens and we are taught that the world operates according to certain physical laws that cannot be broken....man that sounds boring.  Couldn't we just beam ourselves to our vacation locale, instead of driving X number of hours???  After all, quantum theory says two things can be entangled across time and space...but I digress....

And so we dream. We wonder.  We look at our kids and see the future.  We look at the stars and see God.  We look out our fantasy/escapist TV shows and we envision a life that is better...that is more.  

And while I freely admit that there is a fine line between this wonderment and the slippery slope that can lead to the "tyranny of comparison," as Louie Giglio calls it, I still refuse to quit dreaming.  I refuse to give up on the idea that the best days....ARE AHEAD!  As hard as it is to see this truth sometimes, I do believe it.  Deep down, my soul knows it to be true...I simply have to choose to remember it. 

Sometimes it's so hard to see what is plainly right in front of us. 

Hey, I think Picard is about to take on the Borg, so I better go and watch.  "Don't stop believing."