Surreal Dream for DREAMers

"Andrea Gonzalez Garnier, who graduated last spring with a government degree from the University of Texas, and Pedro Villalobos, now in his second year at UT Law School, are Dreamers.  They are called that because they are among the nearly 50,000 students to take advantage of the Texas Dream Act since Texas 13 years ago became the first state to offer unauthorized immigrants in-state tuition at colleges and universities.  Calling it the Dream Act, calling them Dreamers, was intended to present them in the most uplifting, aspirational terms, offering an image of young people who have been inculcated in the American dream in the only home many of them have ever really known, striving to share in its promise.  But it is even more apt than that, because Dreamers like Gonzalez Garnier and Villalobos live lives of surreal extremes, of sublime “I must be dreaming moments” amid a restless undercurrent of cold-sweat anxiety that one day they might learn that it really was all a dream, that they are being sent back to a place they barely know." - Jonathan Tilove, Austin American-Statesman, Sept. 14, 2014, page 1, above the fold.