Dreams Come True

夢が叶う (yume ga kanau): a dream comes true. 夢 (yume) is a dream, here what one hopes for; が (ga) marks it as the subject; 叶う (kanau) is the verb of a wish granted, to come about as one wished, the verb the dictionaries give for a long-held hope fulfilled and for a love that cannot be. The sentence is everyday Japanese, what a Japanese speaker says when a hope comes true, and it needs no source: the verb is old in both its senses and the sentence is the language as it is spoken now. The character 叶 is the right one for this sense, the wish-spelling of the verb, and it is what people write. Dreams come true is the ordinary English equivalent, and in Japan the English phrase is a household name in its own right, the name of a band everyone knows, so the sentence and its English have carried each other for years. 夢が叶う is composed of the words 夢 (read yume) meaning "dreams", the grammatical element が (read ga) which indicates the previous word is the subject, and the verb 叶う (read kanau) meaning "to come true".

This beautiful art is a visual reminder that dreams do indeed come true.