Do You Actually Know Your Dreams?
If you can’t articulate your dreams, write.
In social media and current culture, there’s a lot of talk of personal dreams — having them, manifesting them, working towards them. We all have dreams. But how well do you actually know yours? I always considered myself a big dreamer — but as it turns out — I didn’t know my deepest dreams as well as I thought. Most of my life I’ve been labeled ambitious, and I was very much so in terms of goals — in personal finance, romance, career. But goals are not the same as dreams, and I often mistook one for the other. Even after I achieved my goals, I often felt empty and unsatisfied. I bounded steadfastly in directions that were ultimately misguided. I hadn’t been clear with myself about my true dreams and how they should make me feel. When I strayed, my inner compass couldn’t help me course correct towards my true North Star.
The only way I got crystal clear on knowing my dreams was to write about them. Now I wonder why I avoided writing for so long. Perhaps I believed that if I wrote down my dreams, I would feel the weight of responsibility. Perhaps my perfectionist tendencies were getting the best of me — I would feel the pressure to achieve my dreams. Perhaps I believed writing could not keep up with the vast and infinite possibilities that lived in my mind. If I started, I thought, I couldn’t possibly ever finish.
So, most times I didn’t start. Instead I housed the flurry of disjointed scenes and emotions in my mind, where they could roam, expand, and evolve freely into other disjointed scenes on a mental vision board of sorts. It never served me not to examine them and make better sense of my inner world through writing. And one day I got fed up, because for the 100th time, I couldn’t articulate my goals to my partner Dan in a way that either of us could understand. I pulled out my pen, and didn’t let myself close my notebook until I had finished the exercise. I wrote for two hours. I felt emotionally exhausted after finishing each milestone — I was so tempted to fold an earmark for later. But as I sat on the cross-country flight, I checked in and pressed, “What could be more important than this right now?” So I continued to write.
In this last year, writing has become one of my most powerful tools in self discovery and awareness. It’s up there with dancing, meditation, reading, and having a heart-to-heart conversation. What writing does better than any of those other practices is it brings me greater clarity on my thoughts and my dreams so that I can articulate them. And if I can articulate them, I can live them. It is part of why I am writing to you today. Anyone can begin to experience true fulfillment and gratification. I learned the hard way how to reflect on my dreams, but you don’t have to. Here’s what you need to get real with yourself and become friendly with your deepest dreams:
1. Journal the right way.
For nearly three decades, I thought journaling was synonymous with free-form spilling your feelings onto paper. That sort of writing is expressing — it’s not what we are doing here. To get clarity on your thoughts, ideas, and dreams, you need to reflect. Reflection is possible and productive with some basic structure, like in response to questions or prompts. When thinking about my dreams, I separate them into 6 categories:
Personal development (or how you want to feel about yourself)
Life partner (or love and romance)
Friends and family
Home and environment
Work and contribution
Hobbies and leisure
Thinking and writing about each category separately has shown me that many of my dreams can be mutually exclusive, that one dream may not depend on another. I can have at least six different inner compasses working in parallel. And I can easily tell them apart, which makes it possible for me to know which of my actions are taking me closer to which dreams.
2. Prime your mind and connect with your heart.
If you’re reading this article and are still not sure what your dreams are, this deep reflection exercise will take you there. Before you put pen to paper, prime your mind by getting into the right headspace: Start by believing that good things are possible in your life. How you will get there is not yet important. Once you know your dreams, you will make choices in the direction of your dreams, whether you realize it or not.
Examine the things you long for — the scene of a joyful dinner party that keeps popping back into your mind, the sport for which you would happily drop all other plans to play, the thing you most crave when spending time with other people. The way I check if these dreams are true is I check how I feel when I imagine having them. I know I’m on the right track when I feel hopeful, belonging, and free. I feel a physical body sensation emanating from my core and spreading to my arms and sometimes legs. I know it’s the right thing by how good it makes me feel to imagine having it. Sometimes our dreams were created in childhood, and have since been repressed or forgotten. But if they’re still true, they’ll resurface one way or another. The only way that I can describe how you know your dream is true is that you feel truly good and hopeful after writing it down. It’s the one that makes you feel warm, expansive, and comfortable, and you feel it radiating from the inside out.
As you reflect, slow down to examine possible false negatives. For example, even when you are thinking about your true dreams, you can’t conjure the good feelings. In those cases I double check by reminding myself to cast aside doubt, judgment, and other limiting beliefs. I ask again: If this dream came true, how deeply good would I feel? After putting aside all the limiting beliefs, you can feel that what remains is pure and true.
3. Your dreams are only true if they are yours.
You can be inspired by what other people are doing or saying, but be careful not to adopt images of other people’s lives as your dreams. Another way of saying this is don’t try to be like somebody else or, worse, be someone else. Don’t believe the false promise that if you can become more like somebody else, you will achieve your own dreams. Be your authentic self. Being and accepting yourself before working towards your dreams is the most self-compassionate and effective way to grow in the direction of your dreams.
If you recognize that a scene of somebody else’s life looks very much like how you would describe your own dream, adapt those images into your dreams only after you have seriously examined which aspects of it relate to the dreams that you have had all along. To avoid major regret, you need to get really real with yourself about how these images are related to you and not another person. If you can’t do that, you have to accept that these images of other people’s lives are only that, and that you are not ready to adapt them into your dreams.
To construct your dreams based on someone else’s reality, or, more accurately, your perception of their reality, is dangerously misguided. You have to know how it connects to your original dream, otherwise all the actions you take will be in pursuit of a false dream. And you will fail because you will be chasing somebody else’s dream. And you can never be somebody else. On a similar note, don’t adopt a dream that someone else has for you as your own. You cannot achieve true fulfillment by living to meet somebody else’s expectations.
Be really honest with yourself about which of your dreams are true.
4. Revisit and redo.
Having tried this exercise of articulating my dreams several times over the years, I see that my deepest and true dreams are very similar year to year, decade to decade — at least in certain categories. For example, when I got married 5 years ago, the life partnership of my dreams was to daringly explore “constant, lifelong learning, growth, and exploration” with my new husband, and today that still is very true. My dream to travel anywhere in the world and connect with interesting people is still true. Sometimes the details change. Dreams evolve just as people do. As you do the work over the course of life, your mind comes into greater clarity and focus. And so your dreams can also come into greater clarity and focus.
Other times, when I read what I have written in the past, I am shocked at how outdated the dream is. Or more likely how out of touch I was with my authentic self within a certain category of life. For example, when I was deep in my demanding corporate job, I simply could not imagine the possibilities in my life for Leisure, because I had such a deep habit of reserving that headspace for work. Under Leisure, I wrote a very unsatisfying placeholder “Create more boundaries at work so that I can explore and play more”.
Sometimes you are so focused on one category that you don’t realize until you revisit it that there is so much you can do in the others. Revisiting and updating your dreams regularly can help you examine the categories of your life in which you have been bounding towards your dreams, and the ones in which you can spend more effort. So long as you prime your mind and connect with your heart to the best of your current ability, the exercise is always very motivating. Taking inventory of your progress and imagining a better reality stokes the flame of inspiration and rekindles any motivation that has since simmered down.
Dare to Dream, Dare to Live
You cannot get to know someone from their goals, but you can get to know someone from their dreams. Depending on where you are in your journey, it may not be clear to you what your dreams are, or how they could be a representation of your authentic self. Trust that you have a deep and rich inner world. Trust that you have dreams. It may just take a little more time until you can articulate what they are. Do not let the pressure of having a dream or the fear of not achieving it deter you from examining your dreams in the first place. The danger of not examining our dreams is we take actions in the wrong directions. There is no shame in being at the beginning of your journey…everyone has to start somewhere.
One of the most beautiful quotes I have read recently is:
If you don’t have ideas, read.
If you can’t articulate your ideas, write.
If you can articulate your ideas, build.
If you feel like you don’t know your dreams or you can’t articulate them even when your pen is in hand, go live more. Try new experiences, talk to different people, and read more books. It doesn’t have to take years of your life (it certainly can when you avoid doing the work). If the book says to do a journaling exercise, don’t skip it. Avoiding it feels comfortable and convenient in the moment, but it is work you will do sooner or later. So, do it sooner and begin to reap and enjoy the benefits of it. Every experience in life is more information that you can use to understand the vast possibilities for you. The more you live, the more inspired you feel about what is possible.
