Imagine a dinner with friends. Someone says they wish they lived in a house where nobody ate alone. It is a generous thought, and the table likes it. Then a guest asks whether everyone in the house would be allowed to shut their door. The question produces a small, disappointed silence. Apparently the future looked lovelier before it had bedrooms.
Darling, may I borrow a seat at this table? I’m Camilla Wellton. I’d like you to stay at this table for a moment, especially if you’re the one who asked about the door. Perhaps you meant no harm at all. Perhaps you were asking whether a lovely future would still have room for a tired person to be alone. I make books about desire and the stories we tell about our lives, and this is a question I return to: when we say we want a different world, what do we hope it will feel like on an ordinary night? The answer is often tucked into the small details that spoil the speech and save the dream.
The friend who pictured the house may have been longing for company. The guest who asked about the door may have spent years living where privacy was treated as rejection. Both know something the other does not. Their disagreement has made the future more spacious already.
When I was writing I Want It All, one of the nine books in my Sensual Hero’s Journey, I kept returning to a question: what is the state we hope an object or arrangement will give us? A house can be a wish for welcome. A crowded dinner can be a wish to be wanted. The phrase “I want it all” can sound greedy until we listen for the needs packed inside it. Sometimes what you want is surprisingly modest: one person to call, a place to be quiet, a meal that isn’t rushed.
Try this with your own beautiful picture. Suppose you want a home full of people. What do you hope to feel when they arrive? Warmth? Ease? Proof that you matter? Now ask which parts of that hope require the exact arrangement you pictured. A weekly dinner might offer companionship without asking anyone to surrender their solitude. A neighbour could share a garden without sharing a kitchen. The future may become more generous when we stop treating the first image as the only possible answer.
We are allowed to want the improbable. I do not want a culture that mocks a dream as soon as someone asks who will wash the dishes. That question can be an invitation to make the dream sturdy enough to survive Tuesday. Who buys the food? Who has money to contribute? What if one person has a disability that makes the proposed arrangement exhausting? Who gets to say, “I cannot do this,” without losing their place at the table?
These questions are sometimes called practical, which is a polite way of saying they are less exciting than the original vision. I find them deeply imaginative. They force us to notice that a future is made of hours and bodies, not a single lovely photograph. You can design a magnificent communal kitchen and still leave one person doing unpaid care at midnight. You can promise that everybody belongs and still let the loudest voice choose the music. To imagine well is to let the people who would live there revise the picture.
There is a smaller version of this in romance. Perhaps you picture a partner who understands you without being told. I understand the appeal. How restful it sounds to be known so completely that you never have to risk a request. Yet the imagined partner may not be a person so much as a cure for the fear of asking. If the relationship you want requires mind reading, you have designed a beautiful room with no door through which another person can enter.
This is where another of my books, I Want to Be Touched, can change the scene. Its subject reaches beyond physical contact to the wish to be met and the difficulty of letting another person know how. The shift is small and enormous: from “They should know” to “Could I tell them?” A spoken request does not guarantee that the other person will answer as you hope. It does allow you to learn whether the relationship has room for your actual need.
A dream can also protect us from the embarrassment of our own desire. It is easy to argue for a future of universal welcome. It is harder to say, “I am lonely in this apartment.” One sentence gives us a theory; the other gives someone the possibility of knocking on the door. I would never ask you to trade a political imagination for a purely private solution. The loneliness of a city can be built into its housing, transport, and working hours. But if we can name the personal ache without shame, we have better evidence for what the public design must answer.
What if the picture is not yours at all? A parent wanted you to have a prestigious job. Your friends talk about buying property. A magazine offers a vision of freedom that requires expensive luggage and a startling amount of linen. You may find yourself working hard toward a future that looks excellent from the outside and feels borrowed from the inside.
The card and companion book Reality Revealed belong here. I created them to help us examine the stories through which we interpret what happens. You can use that attention on a dream as well as a fear. Ask: who taught me to call this arrangement success? What have I actually experienced when I tried something like it? What am I predicting? A prediction is not a fact, even when it arrives in your own voice with excellent diction. You may discover that you really do want the shared house. You may discover that you want a small flat with a large table and a reliable way home for guests.
For Black and brown people in the Nordics, the future can carry another burden. We are sometimes asked to imagine one that proves we have finally been admitted to somebody else’s present. I would rather ask what we would build if our contribution were assumed from the beginning. Krull’s Encyclopedia of Afrofuturists offers many answers, because the makers in it have never been obliged to share a single vision. Their work can remind us that a future is not a prize handed over by the people who once held the door. It can be made, argued over, sung, stitched, written, and revised by those who intend to live in it.
Come back to the dinner. The guest asks for a door that closes. Someone else asks who pays for the food. Someone wants the table to welcome a child who cannot sit still. The original dreamer could hear all this as an attack. Or she could get out a piece of paper and make the house larger. Perhaps the best evening ends with a meal next Sunday, a borrowed folding chair, and a promise that nobody has to stay until midnight. A modest experiment can teach a grand vision how to breathe.
I will always defend our right to picture something better than what we have inherited. I also think the most loving thing we can do for a future is let it answer the questions of the people who will live there. The door and the dinner table belong in the same plan.
