I was inspired today by an E-mail I received from a friend who decided to write down her life dreams and then send this to all her friends and family.
Some years ago another friend asked me what my dreams were.
I was thrown by the question because at that point in my life I was not aware of any dreams. I could remember having dreams when I was younger but somehow they got lost as I became an ‘adult’. Experiencing this lost feeling was combined with a real sadness and I have come to believe that fulfilling our dreams is a fundamental human need connected with our need for meaning and purpose.
It is hard to fulfill our dreams if we remain unaware of them and this ‘dream blindness’ I experienced through my early adulthood triggered a real sense of lack in me.
Where did the dreams go?
I’ll write about my own dreams some other time. For now I want to explore the reason why I lost my dreams. Talking with others about this I realise that I’m for sure not the only person in the world who experienced this. I have a theory that many of the challenges we face as a species are somehow linked with this. That when we collectively lose sight of the future we want to create then we stop creating. We exist but without growth or direction. And this is true for individuals, organisations and human kind.
One of my current interests is exploring how the meanings we attach to words shape our personal and collective worlds. Now I’m not a linguistic expert, but I am curious. I think it is no coincidence that the word ‘dream’ has two different meanings.
- a picture of a desired future
- an experience we have while sleeping
The first I create and hold in my conscious being and the second is created by my sub-conscious (as far as I know) and rarely enters into my conscious world.
Night time dreams often defy logic (mine always do!) and the real world in which I live and they rarely stay with me.
It seems to me we get these two things mixed up when thinking (or talking) about dreams. Consider, for example, labelling someone a ‘dreamer’ which usually has a connotations that the person does not live in the real world – or at least has trouble focusing on the real world.
I also believe that the world we’ve created (‘domination system’) relies on most of us losing our dreams. After all if we all dreamed, with all our being, of a better world then little could stop its realisation. So this mixing of meaning is probably encouraged (or at least not discouraged) through the messages we receive through the media in all its wonderful forms.
I find it helpful to take personal responsibility for myself and to untangle the two meanings.
If I trace back to when I lost sight of my dreams it was when I entered the adult world of work, making money and taking on responsibility. My ‘dreams’ were not in the real world and that is the world I chose to live in. For a period of my life I engaged purely in the day to day business of the ‘rat race’ – and I was moderately successful at it. Pushing my dreams to one side was probably a self protection strategy. My life was hardly moving me any closer to my dreams – in fact the opposite.
Looking back, this was an important stage of my life and probably I needed to get it out of my system. Then, when I started to open my mind and heart to the world around me (a slow, ongoing process!) I started to rediscover my dreams, my ideals, my hopes for myself, my family, my species and my world.
To finish up … I would like to encourage everyone to reconnect with their dreams.
Their fulfilment is at the heart of our search for meaning and purpose.
