A Philosophical Illumination on Mortal Dreaming
“We are all guests in this world. But some guests rearrange the furniture for those who come after.”
I. The Seed That Does Not Wait for Its Own Flower
There is an old Chinese saying — perhaps older than the dynasty that first wrote it down — recorded in the spirit of 孔夫子, Kǒng Fūzǐ, the one the West would call Confucius:
“前人种树，后人乘凉。” “The one who plants the tree shall never sit in its shade.”
And yet — the planting happens. The hands go into the earth. The seed is pressed down with deliberate tenderness, as if the planter knows something the seed does not yet know about itself.
Why?
This is the first mystery of human dreaming: that it is not conditional on survival.
The dream does not ask the dreamer for permission to outlive them.
II. Rumi’s Reed and the Longing That Precedes Arrival
In the opening verses of the Masnavi — that vast ocean of Persian mystical poetry — Jalal ad-Din Rumi begins not with a statement of faith, but with a sound:
“بشنو این نی چون شکایت میکند” “Listen to this reed, how it tells a tale of separation…”
The reed flute cries because it has been cut from the reed bed. It does not know if it will ever return. But it plays. It does not silence itself in grief. Its very wound becomes music — music for listeners the reed will never meet, in rooms it will never enter, in centuries it cannot imagine.
Rumi understood something rare: longing itself is a form of future-building. The dreamer who reaches toward a future they cannot inhabit is not deluded. They are — in the Sufi sense — in love. And love, Rumi insists, does not require the beloved to be present. Love creates presence where there was only absence.
To dream of the future you will not see is to fall in love with a world not yet born.
III. Marcus Aurelius in the Dark Before Dawn
In the second century of the Common Era, a man sat in a military tent on the frozen Danube frontier, writing to himself. Not for publication. Not for posterity. For surviving the next hour.
Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν — his Meditations, literally “Things to Himself”:
“Confine yourself to the present.”
And yet — this same man rebuilt aqueducts. He reformed laws. He adopted sons not of his blood and prepared them for an empire he knew he was dying to leave behind.
Here is the Stoic paradox: live only in the present, but build as if the future is someone’s present.
The Stoics called this kathêkon — appropriate action. It is appropriate for a mortal being to act as if the world continues after them, not because of vanity, but because the world does continue, and one’s actions become its furniture.
Marcus did not dream the future to escape death. He dreamed it because doing otherwise would be a betrayal of reason itself.
IV. Ibn Sina Dreams the Flying Man
Ibn Sina — Avicenna — physician and philosopher of Persia, born in 980 CE — conceived one of the most haunting thought experiments in the history of the mind:
The Flying Man. (انسان طائر)
Imagine a man suspended in empty air, blindfolded, limbs stretched so they touch nothing, not even themselves. He has no sensory input at all. Yet — he knows he exists. Something in him reaches forward, dreams, affirms: I am.
Ibn Sina used this to argue for the soul’s independence from the body.
But hear it differently for our purposes:
Even stripped of flesh, of sensation, of the certainty of tomorrow — the self still reaches. The self still intends. The dreaming faculty does not require the body’s permission. It does not check the pulse before it imagines.
Human beings dream the future not because they believe they will see it. They dream because dreaming is what the self is.
V. The Buddhist River and Nagarjuna’s Emptiness
Nagarjuna, the second-century Indian philosopher, father of the Madhyamaka school, said all things are śūnya — empty, without fixed essence:
“सर्वे धर्माः शून्याः।” “All phenomena are empty.”
At first this sounds like a door closing. If nothing has permanent self, why dream anything at all?
But Nagarjuna’s emptiness is not nihilism — it is freedom. Because things have no fixed nature, they can become. The future is not locked. The dream is not futile. The very fact that nothing is permanent means anything — including a better world — can emerge.
The Buddhist dreamer is perhaps the most liberated of all: they do not dream for themselves, because there is no fixed “self” to inherit the dream. They dream for the river. The river does not care which water molecules carry its name downstream. It only needs to keep flowing.
To plant for a future you will not see is, in the Buddhist sense, the purest act — because it is entirely emptied of self-interest.
VI. Tagore Sings at the Threshold
Rabindranath Tagore — poet, philosopher, Nobel laureate, born in Bengal — wrote in his Gitanjali:
“I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument, while the song I came to sing remains unsung.”
This verse breaks the heart. And yet — Tagore did not write it in bitterness. He wrote it as a devotional offering. The unsung song is still a sacred thing. The unlived future is still a worthy horizon.
In his lecture on the “Religion of Man,” Tagore spoke of the surplus in humanity — something in us that exceeds survival, exceeds biology, exceeds the self. A surplus of love, of beauty, of meaning-making.
It is this surplus that dreams. Not the frightened animal who wants to survive. But the poet in us, the one who hears music in wind, who sees children playing and thinks — this must continue, this must be protected, this must be given a future.
Tagore’s dreamer is not a fool. They are the most human version of a human being.
VII. Al-Ghazali and the Dream as Divine Mirror
Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, the great Islamic philosopher and theologian of the 11th century, wrote in his Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn (إحياء علوم الدين — The Revival of the Religious Sciences):
That the heart, when polished of its rust, becomes a mirror — and in a mirror, things appear that the eye alone cannot see.
For Al-Ghazali, the capacity to dream of unseen futures was not wishful thinking. It was kashf — unveiling. A form of knowing that transcends rational calculation.
The dying person who still plants a tree, who still teaches a child, who still speaks a vision into the air — is not being irrational. They have seen something in their polished heart that the actuarial mind cannot calculate:
That meaning does not expire at the moment of death. That love transmitted forward is love that continues to exist.
The dream of a future is not a prediction. It is a prayer pressed into matter.
VIII. Heidegger’s Being-Toward-Death, and the Gift It Gives
Martin Heidegger, the difficult and complicated German philosopher, argued in Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) that death is not the enemy of life — it is its clarifier.
Sein-zum-Tode — Being-toward-death — means that only when we truly acknowledge our finitude do we begin to choose authentically. Only the mortal being, the one who knows the clock is running, truly understands what it means to mean something.
The immortal creature has no urgency. It need not choose.
But the human being — mortal, finite, tender — must choose what to love, what to build, what to leave behind. And in that choosing, even a shortened life becomes weighted with intention.
The dreamer who knows they will not see the harvest is, in Heidegger’s sense, the most authentic dreamer. They are not confused about what they are doing. They are not dreaming for themselves. They are dreaming deliberately, in full knowledge of their finitude, which means every dream they plant is an act of extraordinary honesty.
IX. Viktor Frankl in the Final Dark
In Auschwitz. In the dark that has no name.
Viktor Frankl — psychiatrist, philosopher, prisoner — observed something that no theory had prepared him for:
The people who survived longest — not always in body, but in spirit — were those who had a reason forward. A manuscript to complete. A child somewhere. A question unanswered.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, he wrote, echoing Nietzsche:
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
The future — even an imagined, perhaps unreachable future — was a lifeline. Not an illusion. A tether to meaning.
Frankl called this noögenic — meaning born not from pleasure, not from power, but from purpose. And purpose, unlike the body, does not rot. It can be given away like a torch passed in a relay race, carried by hands that will outlast yours.
To dream the future you will not see is, therefore, the deepest form of meaning-making available to a mortal creature.
X. The Story That Holds All the Stories
Let us come to rest here, in a small imaginary moment:
An old woman — perhaps in Java, perhaps in Samarkand, perhaps in ancient Athens — sits in her garden at twilight. Her hands are thin now. She knows the reckoning of seasons. She plants a seedling.
Her granddaughter asks: “Nenek, why do you plant what you will never see grow?”
The old woman does not answer immediately. She presses the earth gently around the root. Then she says:
“Because I have already seen it. Here.”
And she touches her chest.
This is the final secret the philosophers have been circling:
The future does not exist in time. It exists first in the dreamer.
Rumi’s reed already hears the music before it is played. Ibn Sina’s flying man already exists before his body confirms it. Tagore’s unsung song already lives in the singer’s breath. Al-Ghazali’s polished heart already reflects a light not yet risen.
The human being is the only creature in the known universe who can love what does not yet exist. Who can work, plant, write, build, and teach — not for themselves — but for a morning they will not wake to see.
This is not madness.
This is perhaps the most divine thing about us.
Coda: In my own language
Dan akhirnya — dalam bahasa yang paling dekat ke dada:
Manusia bermimpi bukan karena ia tahu ia akan hidup cukup lama. Ia bermimpi karena mimpi itu sendiri adalah cara ia tetap hidup — melampaui tubuhnya, melampaui namanya, melampaui musim yang mengambilnya.
Pohon yang ia tanam adalah namanya yang lain. Cerita yang ia tulis adalah tangannya yang dititipkan ke masa depan. Cinta yang ia semai adalah dirinya yang terus berjalan di kaki orang-orang yang belum lahir.
Kita tidak mati sepenuhnya selama ada sesuatu dari kita yang masih tumbuh di tanah orang lain.
“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” — Joseph Campbell
“ولكل أجل كتاب” “For every term there is a book” — Al-Qur’an, 13:38
“行到水穷处，坐看云起时。” “Walk to where the water ends — sit and watch the clouds rise.” — Wang Wei, Tang Dynasty
The dreamer does not dream despite death. The dreamer dreams because of it — and in dreaming, becomes briefly, beautifully, larger than it.
Bhyllabus l'énigme 
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