If you asked me where I would be without my dreams, I’d have to say nowhere. My dad always used to tell me that I needed to get out of the dreamland. He referred to my idealistic ( well, he thought it was overly cinematic) view on life. Don’t expect to find the man of your dreams. Don’t expect to get what you want. Learn to live without this and that. 

But I obviously never let go of my dreams. They not only made me who I am, but they gave me the goal that I always wanted to pursue. The dreamer in me was not just restricted to finding the man that Bryan Adams always sang about, though. Or Sidney Sheldon wrote about. Pretty myopic. It was way beyond finding someone to rescue me from life or whatever bothered me at that point. 

My dreams were about trying new things. Learning new skills. Making a difference in the world whichever way I could. I knew what I could do and what I would want to do. The dreamer in me never allowed me to give up. And the best part was that, while the dreams grew with me, the core was almost always the same. How to make a difference and how to combine what I loved with what I did. 

The word ‘dreamer’ is sometimes so unfairly judged. If anyone called you a dreamer, they would make you feel like a child, won’t they? That you have these absolutely fantastic out-of-the-world plans which are unreal. That you have not put any thought into what you want to become. Dreamer has now been labeled into something negative. Like the word,‘politician’. 

Why does it have to be a bad thing that you are a dreamer? Being idealistic is currently synonymous with being negative. Don’t expect too much from life. If anything can go wrong, it will. And thoughts like that is all you hear today. 

Sure, you need to be prepared in life. But that does not mean that you remove the very element of hope and desire in you, does it? If you did not have dreams, then what are you? What your parents hoped you would be? What society demanded from you? What your role as an offspring, spouse, parent, and professional asked from you? ( please note – this is completely neutral-gender rant and not a feminist cry). 

My point is simple. If Martin Luther King had not come out and said – I had a dream – the world today would not be the same. It does not matter what it looks like to someone else. Every good idea was probably discarded by someone else as impossible. Dare to dream. And dare to be the dreamer you always set out to be. Do not let life get to you. 

It’s really funny isn’t it? That in order to survive and stand out among the crowd, you need to fit in. Do what the ordinary mortals do. It’s time to change that bit. 

It’s your life, and it’s your dream that will allow you to live it.