Dare to Dream

Mary W. Matthews

You gotta have a dream,
If you don’t have a dream,
How you gonna have a dream come true? — “South Pacific”

For as long as we have been human beings, people have dreamed of the Moon — that symbol of enchantment and mystery, yearning and lunatic creativity, hanging there in the sky like a Liberty dime. I love those midnights when the whole world shimmers with silver light and you sense that anything is possible.

Without the Moon, there would be no tides; without the tides, there might be no life on Earth, and if there were, it would be nothing like life as you and I experience it. But this is pragmatism, and today I write about dreaming. Does anyone but a schoolchild care that the sidereal month is 27.32166 days long, or that the Moon weighs 6 times 10²⁷ grams?

We have dreamed of the Moon for as long as we have been human enough to dream. As a child, longing for a deity with whom I could identify, I read everything I could get my hands on about the Moon, which the Egyptians called “the Mother of the Universe.” From Egypt and Babylon to the far East, from North America to Britain to South Africa, the Moon was the eternal Great Mother. Her names have included Albion, Danu, Demeter (“mother of the gods”), Diana, Hina (whence wahine, “made in the image of Hina”), Heva, Kore, Luna, Luonnotar, Macha Alla, Mama Quilla, Mardoll, Metra, Mictecaciuatl, Mwezi, Ningal, Selene — for millennia, the world over, the Moon has symbolized both wisdom and all parts of the cycle of creation. It is no accident that such feminine archetypes as maiden, mother, and crone reflect the phases of the Moon.

The root word for both “moon” and “mind” is the Indo-European manas, mana, or men, representing the Great Mother’s “wise blood” in women, governed by the Moon. The word mania originally meant “ecstatic revelation,” and to be moonstruck was to be chosen by the Goddess. The word “silly,” derived from Selene, one of the Moon’s names, originally meant “blessed.” The Judeo-Christian-Islamic is the only tradition in world history that disdains the Deity’s feminine qualities and insists that only the yang — the Lord / Father / Sun / Son — may ever symbolize the ineffable mystery of God.

In ancient times, scientists paid considerable attention to the Moon because of its religious importance, and the data gathered were of an exactness given to no terrestrial phenomena. Stonehenge is not the only monument that is actually a giant calendar, but it may be the most beautiful. The Babylonians devised elaborate calculations for predicting lunar eclipses. In the second century BCE, Hip­parchus had discovered all sorts of “science facts” about the Moon. In the second century CE, Ptolemy discovered the phenomenon called “evection”; centuries later, Tycho Brahe and Newton were no less fascinated.

I was a child in Washington, D.C., when the Cold War was at its frostiest; I lived with the certainty that I would be annihilated by a nuclear blast or the ensuing firestorm before I ever reached adulthood. So I dreamed of the remote serenity of the Moon, and read every science fiction story involving the Moon I could find. How I longed to travel to the Moon and fly, like Holly Jones, through the “Bats Cave” of air that Robert A. Heinlein described in 1957’s “The Menace From Earth”!

I followed as much of the “space race” as I could, given that it was a world from which I felt excluded — though no one ever said it in so many words, I felt that the cultural attitude was, “You can’t ever go into space, you’re just a gur-ul.” But for me, the point of the space race was never the perceived U.S. rivalry with the U.S.S.R. (which history has shown was almost as ridiculous as perceiving an equality between a lion and an alley cat). For me, the point was the shared national dream of the Moon. First stop, the Moon, I dreamed; second stop, a space habitat; third stop, Mars; fourth stop, the stars. Today, all these years later, my husband and I agree that humanity is hard-wired to seek whatever is Out There, to dream dreams of a greatness beyond the humdrum world of the avarice of Big Business or the corruption of Big Religion.

July 20, 1969 is etched in my mind along with only two other days: November 22, 1963, and September 11, 2001. And only one of those three is a day I enjoy recalling.

And so I propose two new national holidays. September 11 is obvious, a day of grave remembrance that will be (at least until the merchandisers have their way) what Memorial Day ought to have been all along.

But to balance off the sorrow of September 11, let us also make July 20 into a national holiday — Moon Day. This would be the day when we remember when a nation dreamed a dream together and rejoiced when we made the dream come true. Ideally, it will become a day on which we dare to dream new dreams.