4 Reasons Why Dreams Matter in Your Life
What’s the point of dreaming anyways?
I know for many of us, dreaming may be new, and even if it isn’t new, the scale we will be talking about might be. One of the exercises I have in dreaming starts with making a list of 100 dreams. That’s a lot, and frankly, it’s a lot of work to come up with, but we’ll get to that later. For today, I want us to talk about what the point is. I know we covered this a bit with the story from The Dream Giver that I shared on Friday, but I want to go deeper and hammer out why we should care.
I highly recommend rereading that story, so go check out Friday’s post, The Dangers of a Dream, again to remind yourself of that importance, but beyond that story, let’s talk about some other reasons dreaming matters.
1. Dreams give us life
In The Greatest Miracle in the World by Og Mandino, he posits that the greatest miracle anyone could perform is bringing someone dead back to life. But people don’t have to be dead and buried to be walking corpses. He writes, “Most humans, in varying degrees, are already dead. In one way or another they have lost their dreams, their ambitions, their desire fora better life. They have surrendered their fight for self-esteem and have compromised their great potential. They have settled for a life of mediocrity, days of despair, and nights of tears.” This quote sounds a lot like me preparing for my husband’s first deployment. I lived confined to our house for months before his departure because I could not handle missing a moment with him. I was terrified that these would be my last days and that I would crumble completely once he left. I shut out everything in my life to focus only on him and the fact that he was going. I have so many regrets about that time, and while I know I can’t promise the next time will be different, I committed to not putting my life on hold again.
About six weeks before my husband was set to deploy, my extended family on my dad’s side got together for a week in the mountains, as we have done for most of my life. All 16 (now 18) of us in one house was one of my favorite parts of the summer. We skipped a couple of years due to Covid, and the grandchildren are all older, which makes coordinating everyone’s schedule much more complicated, so it was amazing that everyone could come for that summer. But I chose to sit it out because I had confined myself to be a prisoner in my house. I really regret missing that week because I let go of a dream (just for a moment) of being part of an incredibly connected family. I wasn’t more fulfilled staying at home. I was living a shell of my real life.
Once my husband deployed, though, all those dreams flooded back. I was no longer missing moments with him because all I had left was countdown the days until he was back. So I could use that time to pursue what I was passionate about. I got to chase my dreams without missing family dinners. The deployment was actually easier for me (it was by no means easy) than the months leading up to him leaving because I had my dreams to bring me back to life. They will do the same for you.
2. Dreams build a bridge
Dreams are the connection point between our now and a better future. Dreams give us a map of how to get there, whether that better future starts tonight or 30 years from now. When we think about a better future, we often think about a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It feels like a destination to get to, and everything will be perfect once we arrive. But that isn’t the future we’re promised, and it’s certainly not the one we will get.
The best we can do is chart a course of where we want to, hope to, and work to end up. The end will always be a moving target because there will always be a better future to pursue. Dreams show us the way, though. They show us how to pursue a better future that is specifically designed for each of us. My better future might be someone else’s present. Someone else’s better future might be my worst nightmare. I have friends who would love to own acres of land in the middle of nowhere and do their best to live off it. That sounds terrible to me. I genuinely hope they get everything they desire with that dream, but I am far too indoorsy to live somewhere that isn’t within 20 minutes of a Target. In my mind, less people equals more snakes, and that is just not a trade I am willing to make.
Our better futures are individualized to us and to our families. That’s why our dreams are so unique and why each of us must go on the individual journey of discovering them. We can only get to the better future we desire by looking at a map of our dreams and charting a course. Blindly living day to day will never get us to where we want to be or who we want to become.
3. Dreams are the basis for our world today
Everything we see in the world today started as a dream in someone’s mind. Every building was the dream of an architect. Every charity was the passion of someone wanting to change the world. Every book started as a vision in someone’s mind of a story to share. We wouldn’t make it very far as a society without a dream, without a picture of something greater in the future.
The people in the past had some great and some not-so-great dreams that built our world today. They each had unique ways of looking at problems and different passions they wanted to bring to life while solving those problems. Major inventions and advancements in medicine all started in the mind of someone like you and me. The previous generation of dreamers shaped the world as we know it.
We have the opportunity to unleash our dreams into the world. The world has problems that need our unique perspectives to solve. It would be negligent to the next generation to ignore our hearts' calls to change things. I know I talk a lot about dreams on a grand scale. Massive dreams like building city skylines and curing the incurable, but I believe the small dreams are just as earth-shaking.
Think about a smaller dream like seeing Taylor Swift in concert (although this may be a huge dream with how crazy it is to get tickets) and how acquiring tickets to a show changes so many little things. I was lucky enough to be invited to the show, which changed many little things. It changed what city I spent the weekend in. It changed who my son was with. It changed what my favorite food truck was. It deepened a friendship. It led to surprising encounters with people I was not expecting to see. Maybe the changes don’t seem that big when we look at today, less than a week after the concert, but who is to say that twenty years from now I don’t look back to see the ripple effects of attending it.
I think we can all look at our lives and see the invisible string (see what I did there, Swifties?) that created our lives and led us to where we are today. That string extends forward, building our lives if we simply take the time to identify the dreams it is pulling us towards.
4. Dreams matter because you matter
Seriously, there isn’t much to say on this point. Dreams matter because you matter. You have thoughts and opinions, and they should be heard. Even if you don’t think you have ambitions for something greater in life, I know there are things you can’t stand about your life today. In fact, one of the exercises I talk about later is that it might be easier to figure out what you don’t want than what you do.
If you can tell me that you are perfectly happy in your life and there is nothing that would change it for the better, then you’re right — dreaming is probably a waste of time. I don’t think that’s the case for many people, though. I am very happy in my life, and yet there are so many things that I want to change. My happiness today will not suffice as my happiness tomorrow in the same way a birthday gift when you were six probably wouldn’t make a good present for you today.
You are important. Self-esteem and confidence are essential ingredients to dreaming, but they don’t have to be strong in someone at the start. If there is even the tiniest rustle in your spirit, maybe something, anything, could be a little bit better than dreaming is for you. And I promise, it will change your life.
