Bailey interned with Dreame while on Career 17
Me and my dream with Yuval
Intertwining the ethereal with the tangible is a task that daunts great authors, musicians, and painters. Artists are always mastering, revising, and inventing new ways of gracefully coalescing these two dimensions that at times, seem like arch nemeses. I do not consider myself a patron of any of the aforementioned trades. However, I did spend one sleepless night wrestling with the age old dilemma: how does one artfully craft both dream and reality?
I will begin this story on the critical cusp of sleep and wakefulness. Those few fateful seconds which can be destroyed by a slight sound or movement in a space rooms away—the opening of a squeaky fridge or the shutting of a heavy window. These last few moments in which a final image, shape or picture flashes through the mind before the eyes give one final blink, the brain shuts down and the body eases into sleep. On this particular night, my last few moments were being disturbed by the repetition of an image from a dream. This dream however was not my own.
I began dating a guy only weeks after arriving in Tel-Aviv on my internship program. I accompanied a friend on her Tinder date, expecting very little from her ‘match’ and much less from the date who was arranged to keep me company. However after a pleasant first meeting, and a couple more weeks of consistently seeing one another, I realized he was someone that I could see myself seriously dating. He was smart, caring, and funny and it wasn’t long before I began to fall in love with him.
One evening we were driving from Jaffa and we began to discuss my plans for after the 6 month span of my internship. I told him I was unsure, but that life in Israel was hard and the idea of staying was not one I was enthused about. I could tell this answer upset him and we rode the distance to my apartment in silence. I left the car feeling as though I had cost myself the most stable, reliable, and loving man I had met in years. Two days passed and we had no contact. I wasn’t sure if I would hear from him again. Finally on the third day, he called me.
He told me he had been thinking a lot about our conversation and that he cared about me and wanted me to stay in Israel. He said that regardless of what I chose to do, he would be happy with me while I was here. He then became silent for a moment.
“I had a dream” he said.
“What was it?” I asked
“It’s really stupid”
“Tell me, I’m curious.”
“It’s really embarrassing.”
“Please tell me.”
I was the dreamer of us two. I was always rambling on about my blonde daughter, my flying stuffed animals, and my professors dripping black ink out of their noses— all stories I had created in the space of time between my final and first blink.
“It was you and me” he said, “and we were really really little. You were in a red dress and I was in a suit and we were dancing.”
That night I lay awake with this image flashing through my mind. Continuously reverberating in different forms— one time he and I were dancing as tiny dogs, the next we were really little cartoons, in another we were ourselves. However, in every image we are tiny, we are dancing and we are happy. This serene image, us in our beautiful clothes, I wanted to somehow make it come true.
I awoke the next morning groggy, with the image still sprinkling its seeds in the pockets of my imagination. I took out a scratch pad and a pen and attempted to doodle these two tiny people, dressed in a glistening floor length gown and a fitted tuxedo, swaying. However, after a couple of failed sketches, my dreary eyes glazed over and I went to my bedroom to check my email. Now this next part of my story may seem like a dream in itself. A fabricated distortion of reality. However I assure you what I saw in my inbox was no dream, but an email from my internship coordinator. Netta’s email read: “ Here are a list of the internships we discussed. I also added in another option which you may be interested in. It is a personal favorite of mine. It is a new startup where you can have your dreams drawn by different artists around the world.” A company called Dreame.
The two founders and I
It was a dream, a tiny image reemerging in my subconscious that began it all. I am now the Editor and head curator of the newest branch of Dreame called Dreame Diaries–an online magazine that publishes high quality, honest and inspired, peer-produced content. I am working alongside two incredible women and two of my closest friends. Dreame and Career Israel allowed me, a 22-year-old recent college grad, to create a new life for myself in Israel- one filled with an amazing love, an incredible career, and copious amounts of Burekas.
