Life & Wisdom Quote by Jeff Vandermeer

Vandermeer’s line lands like a rebuke to two kinds of complacency: the naive utopian and the self-satisfied realist. “Dreaming” isn’t framed as indulgence or escape; it’s treated as a civic technology, the tool societies use to prototype futures before they harden into policy. The sting is in the qualifier. It’s not just that we need dreams. We need better ones, because history punishes sloppy imagination as reliably as it punishes its absence.

“Dreaming poorly” smuggles in a critique of ideologies that sell clean narratives - purity, inevitability, restoration - and then act surprised when the story demands villains and sacrifices. Bad dreams are often the most seductive: they’re simple, they flatter, they reduce complexity to a single lever you can pull. Vandermeer, whose fiction thrives on ecosystems gone strange and boundaries that refuse to hold, understands how power loves a bad dream precisely because it’s legible. It gives administrators, propagandists, and zealots a script.

The second half, “or not at all,” takes aim at another failure mode: the fear of imagining alternatives. That’s the spirit of “There is no alternative,” the bureaucratic worldview that treats the present order as natural law. Vandermeer’s subtext is that refusing to dream isn’t neutral; it’s a decision to let momentum govern, to outsource the future to whoever is most willing to fantasize loudly.

Contextually, it fits a 21st-century mood where climate anxiety, political extremism, and tech-fueled unreality collide. The quote reads as both warning and job description: imagination is unavoidable; the only question is whether we will wield it responsibly.