When mobility is a dream

Remember Christmas when you were a kid? You'd wake up early and sneak down to the tree to check your presents. The last few mornings, I've been waking up at 5 a.m. The first thing I do is look outside to see if it's real. And, yes, it is. There's a mobility van out there. Like Christmas morning, I don't go back to bed. I sit, amazed, and these words of C.S. Lewis come to mind:

The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world: the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one.

I am in the waking world, I tell myself. The dream I had of mobility is now part of the waking world. And then I look again.

I used to assume mobility was a right, but have learned that, for people with disabilities, it's still a privilege. When you use a power chair and need an accessible vehicle, if you can't afford the equipment, you don't get mobility of the kind others take for granted.

Yet in the waking world, your dream of mobility is with you all the time. If you go somewhere in a car, you sit in a manual wheelchair, unable to push yourself, to move independently, your autonomy denied. In your power chair , you sit watching cars pass by, knowing they won't hold you and your chair and can't take you places where others are free to go.

Maybe you don't think of words like right and privilege, but you dream of mobility. And, sometimes, it hurts. You scream down alleys but the only echo in the waking world is a voice saying this is the way it is.

When you sleep, you dream of flying carpets, teleportation, magic. You wake up and know it would take far less than magic to have mobility, but is far less likely to happen.

This is the way it is.

Every time we treat mobility as a privilege, not a right, we teach that physical limits carry a myriad of other limits with them, that people with disabilities should leave their dreams in the dreaming world and not dare to carry them into the waking world.

Yet the waking world is the only place where dreams can become real, where mobility can become a right. And to say this is the way it is keeps mobility in the category of privilege, kills hope, denies equality.

Perhaps I wake up early now because I know the limits of the dream world. I need the waking world to change the way it is.

Dreams matter.