Updated Dreams for Your Current Self

I have a sometimes tiny, sometimes busting at the seams draft email that I refer to as my blog file. It is where I keep any ideas that pop into my head, at any time. I can access it at work, at home, on my iPhone. Jason does not understand how I maintain my blog file, as it’s quite unusual, but it works quite well for me. Different strokes, for different folks, right?

Last month, thanks to Google Reader, I read an article about what happens when our dreams change. The author suggests that this phenomenon usually happens when A) you are transitioning to another major phase of your life (teenager to adult, mid-life to retirement); B) you have fulfilled a dream of the past; or C) during/after a life-changing event (job loss/gain, death, illness, etc.). The article resonated with me, so much so that I left it to sit in my blog file so that I could ruminate on what it meant for me.

I find myself to be this funny kind of individual which I attribute to both the funny mixture of my parents’ traits along with a very interesting past. I have always been a dreamer at heart yet I am perhaps one of the biggest realists I have ever met. I like facts and I like to get down to the bottom of things. Patterns are fascinating to me. However, you can catch me in a daydream at many different times of the day and I can almost always find even a tiny morsel of hope in any situation (mostly). I/we/you can prevail! Somewhere inside of me, lives the world’s tiniest motivator, reassuring me that it will all be ok, that I can do it, and that if everyone just put their minds to it, they could, too. At times this tiny motivator seems to have a hoarse throat, as it’s so hard to hear him/her. And sometimes, I roll my eyes at tiny motivator because I’m not sure he/she knows what the (#*@ he/she is talking about.

What remains is that I always have a dream. Martin Luther King, Jr. jokes aside (or Glenn Beck, for that matter), I have lived my life with dreams of what I will be doing in the future. Now, some of these dreams are mere fantasies for I am not the world’s most brilliant neuroscientist/comedy writer/most successful advocate finally bringing about true equality in the world. However, some of my dreams are very real. And some of my dreams resulted in me sitting here writing this post. Dreams are powerful things. In fact, the more I read about how amazing our brains truly are, the more I see how daydreaming can be a vital component of success.

So, what happens when the dream you’ve always had, or had for a long period of time, suddenly changes? Despite the reasons, it is often, at the core, due to some sort of reassment of priorities. I am in a dream changing phase right now. I will not try to pretend it is the first as life often forces us to repeatedly change our dreams but it is possibly the biggest change in quite some time. My previous dreams left me feeling stuck, stubborn, and negative. Overall, I am quite excited about it because it requires me to both relinquish control yet gain control over different areas of my life. (PS – If you’ve mastered this task, I would like your personal email and possibly some sort of button that will allow me to wake you for consultation, at virtually any time of day, or night.) There is something truly magnificent about allowing your life to change. The Fries’ article I read said “to be open to the possibility of new dreams that better match your current self, right here, right now.” Allowing your dreams to reflect who you are in the present is amazingly liberating. No longer are you conforming to a previous version of yourself, nor are you forcing yourself to become someone you are not. You are just, you, envisioning yourself achieving your goals.

I am curious if any of you have experienced a change in dreams/path, either in the past or recently. If so, how did you handle it? Was it embraced or did you fight the change? And what was the result?

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