A plea for dreaming

Let us dream. Close your eyes for a moment and let your thoughts roam completely free. What do you dream of? What is the greatest goal you have set for yourself in life? Are you pursuing it at the moment? If not, why not? If you have a dream that you are currently "not really" pursuing, you probably feel the same way as some others, including myself. That is certainly also due to the pandemic, which is currently restricting our options for action quite a bit. So for the moment, there is nothing left for us to do but… dream.

When I compare the goals I had as a child with those I have now, it is quite sobering. As a child, my dreams were much bigger. At the same time, they were remarkably concrete. I used to want to be an author, an actress and a doctor, and of course to be the best at everything. The dreams were about "when I grow up". Now, at 22 years old and somewhere in the realm of adulthood, I am no longer so sure what the goal of my life is. When asked about my big dreams, I come across roughly two types: the concrete one (hiking the Pacific Crest Trail) and the abstract dream (leaving something behind for society that has a significant and positive influence). Now it should be noted here that I am goal-oriented and basically claim of myself that I achieve what I set my mind to. However, these two example goals are things that I am currently not really actively pursuing, even though I have set my mind to them. How can that be? 

When I asked a few friends, the same phenomenon could be observed: in all their heads, they exist, the big dreams. Some are more abstract, some detailed images. Olivia (23) dreams of minimising social inequality in the world. Sophia's (23) dream is to open a café in Spain someday. Sebastian (19) dreams of having everything he loves around him and being able to do everything he likes to do. What these dreams have in common is that they are currently not being actively pursued. But what stops us from realising a life dream? The answer I got to the question was always the same: the dream is too big. Is it? Somehow I had imagined the answer to be more complex and multifaceted. Is it that simple? Do we need to set ourselves smaller goals? To put it quite unclearly: sort of. 

Of course it is easier to achieve small goals. That seems very logical to me. But that does not mean that we cannot dream big anymore. And it does not mean that we cannot achieve big goals. What we do have to do for that, however, is to tackle the dream very explicitly and specify it. So take baby steps. Because in order to achieve long-term and big goals, it helps to set clear intermediate goals (that is basically motivational psychology 101). An example of how this works can be seen in Lotta (22). She dreams of looking back on her life someday and being satisfied with the individual steps she has taken. The many small decisions she has made along her way should be evaluated positively in retrospect. Just small steps, but so many that she confidently walks towards her goal with them. Her dream is big and long-term, but it consists of the small intermediate steps. When asked whether she is currently actively pursuing this goal, she answers with "yes". Although she could sometimes pursue it more actively, but on the whole she is doing it.

So let us continue to dream big. Let us also very consciously set the goals that lie so far away that they seem almost impossible. Let us idealise ideas and strive for them, and let us continue to fall on our faces because of course it is not that simple anyway. But let us try. If we accept that big dreams, in order to realise them, must be structured and perhaps divided up in the meantime, the goal seems closer. Dreams structure our vision of the future. They are the music of the future that we hear when we allow ourselves to fantasise, and which becomes a little louder with every single step we take.