Community Dreams

by Raven

Let’s walk away from reality for a few moments.

Most communities start with a dream.  We could be living differently.  We could be living with our friends.  We could find people.  We could build something together.  We could share.  We could share a lot of things.

Some people write about these dreams.  Utopian novels (and now solarpunk stories) often feature communal settings.  In 1948, a behavioral scientist wrote a utopian novel to show his theories in action.  One woman read the novel (Walden Two) nearly twenty years later and was inspired by it.  She thought, “It was impossible to believe that there was no such place in real life.” (Kathleen Kinkade, A Walden Two Experiment, p.7)  That was the origin of the Twin Oaks Community.

Of course, turning dreams into reality takes a lot of work. And there are many folks in the communities that didn’t come to them because of their dreams. Some never dreamt of anything like communal living until they happened upon a community or a community advertisement or story and realized that they wanted this.  A few were dragged to a community by their partners, metaphorically kicking and screaming, until they discovered communal living could be rather nice and they liked it.  I’ve even heard tales of communities that were started totally unintentionally.  (Which seems rather unfair to those of us who have worked so hard, often with little success, to intentionally start them.)

But community dreams are important.  And as much as I try here in Commune Life to show the difficult realities of communal creation and living, I also want to validate the importance of those community dreams.  Let me end with this quote from Henry David Thoreau: “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”