Everyone has a dream. Maybe it’s something they want to do, a place they want to go, or perhaps something they’ll dedicate their whole life to. Whatever form it comes in, we all have a dream. My dream is to help others live out their dream. What I’ve found is that way too many of us have a skewed viewpoint on dreams. It’s not something to be achieved but rather something we can think about periodically to briefly pull us out of our mundane lives. Daydreaming.
When described this way, daydreaming doesn’t seem all that different from any other drug. We’ve cheapened it to nothing more than a dopamine hit. A quick rush to shake things up. I can attest to doing this. I’ll often let myself drift into a blissful daydream, especially when life gets hard. I start to think about how I wish things were and idealize a future where I’m not struggling how I am currently. Pretty soon, I find myself exchanging my life now for a life that may never exist.
Here in lies the problem how dreams we compartmentalize dreams. No longer are they something to work towards and one day realize, rather, they become a way to cope with our current reality.
When did dreams become a commodity? Maybe the easiest way to answer this is to start from a place where dreams were perfect. I’m of course referring to childhood. As kids, dreams aren’t something we misused. Dreams were simply windows offering glimpses into the inevitable. I don’t know about you but as a child, I certainly wasn’t using dreams to distract myself from an unpleasant reality. Well, aside from the occasional boring lecture or mandatory chapels I had to attend. Instead I dreamed of things that I intended to make a reality.
I would dream of being on stage in the spotlight, of traveling the world to meet new people and absorb the diverse cultures of the world, of owning a business that provided for my family, of getting the perfect lob pass from my teammate and dunking on the entire Celtics organization in front of their miserable fans. Unfortunately for me, nature made the latter an impossibility but aside from my impossible dream of playing in the league, my dreams were just things I wanted to achieve.
Then I grew up. The future I used to daydream over was no longer something that awaited me. Instead it began alluding me. Drifting further and further from my reach. Realizing this, my daydreams started taking a new form. I used them not as a window into the future but a distraction from my now. Why? Because the road to a dream is long, arduous, and not guaranteed.
Dreams aren’t the fairytales we make up in our head. They are our connection to our sense of purpose, our reason for living, the why of our life. Fairytales always have a happy ending but for dreams, that’s not always the case. Dreams will intoxicate us with what could be but between that and us is the path of reality. A demanding, unforgiving path that forces so many of us to quit somewhere along the way. Those of us who are persistent and unwavering may have a chance to realize our dream but even that isn’t guaranteed. People like Tesla and MLK taught us that.
This is what dreams are. Not the billowy clouds we cheapen them to be. They’re not fairytales, the realization of our deepest ambitions and desires. Dreams are more than just the wishes we reduce them to. They are our chance at getting more out of this life. An opportunity to take a pure thought and bring it to existence. But dreams come at a cost. For those of us that limit our dreams to daydreams and what could be comes at the cost of regret. As for the others, those who fearlessly pursue their dreams in hopes of making them a reality, the cost is your whole life with no guarantee of achieving it by the end of the road. Which will you choose?
