I often go on long run/walks to start my days. Sometimes I jam to music, other times I listen to podcasts. Either way, my mind often wanders and invariably meanders to the things I’m dreaming about.
On one of my outings last week, as I was noodling about my dreams, past and present, I started to notice a stark contrast between a few of them. Some were bright and shiny, pulsing with life and a beckoning me to begin. Others were gray-scale and gloomy, even though they were dreams of mine.
What an odd juxtaposition of things that were all dreams, I thought, until I realized why they were different.
For me, and I imagine for others, once a dream is imagined, it enters the dream-dread scale. On the dream end, while I’m imagining this dream, I am thinking about all its angles, all the possibilities, all the potential bright futures. With each one, I envision it with as much clarity and focus that I can until that dream is big and beautiful and unavoidably tantalizing.
But, if I don’t DO something about that dream, if I don’t find ways to start making it happen, to start bringing it to fruition, it starts to creep over the midpoint of the dream-dread scale into dread. Soon, I start thinking of the ways it could go wrong, the ways I might waste my time pursuing it, the ways I might end up looking foolish. The further away from dreaming and action that my mind wanders, the more I start to dread moving forward. Until finally I just stall and the dream withers.
And I know it’s not just me. We all experience this dynamic. When we leave something too long in dreamland, it oozes into dreadland and we lose the energy and motivation we had to make it happen.
But all is not lost. Dreams can be resurrected from dread by revisiting that most beautiful version of the dream, and then taking a step, even the smallest step you can think of, toward making it real.
What is the very smallest step of one of your dreams lost in dread? To say it out loud? To share it with a friend? To ask Chat GPT what to do first?
Whatever it is…you can do it.
A dream unrealized…I was more interested in picking flowers than tagging runners…