The Dangers of a Dream
I had a different post planned for today, where I wrote about some activities and methods to help get the ball rolling on discovering our dreams. But I realized that I was skipping ahead again. I’m sure this will happen often, and hopefully, my website team doesn’t get too annoyed with me for switching out my posts. While it will be fun to work on discovering our dreams, I have to give a disclaimer before I help anybody find their dream. It would be negligent of me not to warn you that dreaming is DANGEROUS.
I want you to have all the facts before taking the next step forward.
One of my favorite movies is Next. In it, Nicholas Cage plays Cris Johnson, a man who can see precisely 2 minutes and 27 seconds into the future, except for when it comes to this woman with whom he can see their entire life together. It’s a great movie, and I highly recommend watching it if you enjoy romance, action and movies with awful trailers from 15 years ago.
He has a quote at the beginning and end of the movie where he says, “Here is the thing about the future. Every time you look at it, it changes because you looked at it, and that changes everything else.” I must warn you that when you begin to dream, you are seeing the future. Maybe you’ll discover a dream that, down the road, you realize just isn’t a desire anymore. But for most of our dreams, they will create a blueprint for the future. They will be a map of what is to come.
We can’t turn back from knowing the future. We can’t go back to ignorance. We can ignore our dreams for a time, and believe me, I have, but they will always be there. And like in The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, we may get away with burying them in the floorboards, but we will know they are always there until their thumping becomes so loud we must address it. Dreams are big and small, but I genuinely believe every one of them is a calling we must answer. These dreams have chosen your heart to take root in, and in some way, you are the only person capable of bringing that dream to fruition. Sure many of us may have the same dreams on the surface, but when we look deeper, they are all uniquely ours.
For example, let’s talk about my dream car, a Maybach by Mercedes. You may have the exact same dream car but likely for different motivations. It is my dream car because it feels like a very fancy car that is also on the practical end. I’ve ridden in one before, and it is incredibly comfortable. My favorite feature is the speaker from the front seat into the back seat so that everyone can hear the conversation. If this is the car you want, you probably have a slightly different reason for wanting it. And, even if your motivation is exactly the same, I can guarantee that our experiences having it will be different. I will speed through the yellow lights that someone else stops at. I will take far too long turning left while someone else will have the confidence to go quickly. I will stop for gas at a quarter of a tank while my husband waits until the light is on before he even begins to look for a gas station.
These may not sound like big deals. They may all be little differences between Maybach drivers, but they are all different fruitions of the same dream. Each Maybach driver has had the dream of owning that car come true, and they all react differently. For some, it is a stepping stone to a much fancier, more expensive car; for others, like me, it will be the finish line. Each dream you discover is uniquely yours. I think that is one of the most beautiful things about dreaming because everyone who achieves their dream is the first. They are the first to accomplish that dream in that way.
It is an extraordinary process, but it is dangerous because there is no turning back. Once we’ve seen the future, we can’t unsee it. The only thing left to do when you discover your dream is to work on it, and whether it takes 10 minutes or 10 years, dreams take time to achieve. They take commitment, planning and flexibility.
I know this is a reference-heavy post, but if you allow me, I want to share one last example of why dreaming is dangerous, this time from the other side. This story comes from the book The Dream Giver by Bruce Wilkinson. In it, he tells the story of working on filming a movie about the AIDS crisis and the orphanhood crises it caused in Kenya. The movie follows a child as he journeys from a small town where his parents had died from AIDS to a big city, hoping to find a relative. On the day they were supposed to begin filming, they arrived at the site to find police surrounding a child, about the same age as the lead in the film, who had died on the street from hunger and exposure. No one knew the name of this child or where he was from. Wilkinson concludes this chapter and his book by writing, “Why did the nameless boy die on the sidewalk? I believe his Need was someone else’s Dream—a Big and important Dream that had not been embraced or pursued.” He continues, “It certainly cannot be God’s will that any child die alone and abandoned. Surely God placed a particular set of interests and abilities in one person, somewhere in this world, and put that person in a time and place where Great Things could happen—should have happened—for that boy.”
It’s one hell of a story and quite the gut punch. Whether you believe in a higher power or not, I think the point of the story stands. We’ve established that every dream, even if it looks the same on the surface, is different. It will meet a distinct need for us and for the world. It is dangerous to dream, but I truly believe that it is much more dangerous not to. I hope you’ll take the risk and find the big and small dreams that were designed for you to achieve, no matter the consequences.
