On the Destruction of Dreams
“Why are you talking about anything like that? It never works.”
”Get your head out of the clouds, stop daydreaming.”
“I’m only telling you this for your own good.”
Our society talks a good game when it comes to encouraging dreams, believing in human potential and teaching that anyone can reach for their dreams. We talk the talk but we have a long history of not walking the walk.
The act of dreaming; of finding an idea or concept and chasing it down until it reveals the potential hidden within, takes tremendous courage and creativity. To take that raw concept and refine it into a deliberate course of action requires the capacity for using and applying logical thought. To stand up before even one person and say, “I have an idea,” also takes courage. It is a process that embodies the human spirit the desire to achieve, the desire to create, the desire to overcome.
This is where society breaks down. The promised response is, “What a great idea! What will you do with it?” My personal experience is that more people will respond this way to a new piece of furniture than to a dream. Instead, the dreamer is often met with a host of reasons why a dream will not work, or worse, why the dreamer is not adequate for the tasks the dream requires. The most abhorrent examples involve children and their dreams.
Children dream almost as if to prove that it is the natural state of a human to do so. They are also quite natural entrepeneurs. Lemon-aid stands have moved from reality to archetype, but children will see opportunity, dream the options and potential and announce the dream in mere seconds.
Mom makes great pies, she should sell them, a child will announce, as if wondering why no one thought of it before. Children at school always want me to make sketches of them, I should charge and work toward opening my own art gallery. I like dogs and teaching them tricks, I should become a dog trainer. The lists of dreams goes on and on, and a child will find a dream in almost every day.
Instead of being met with any sort of positive reinforcement or encouragement to even investigate their dreams, children are generally given very negative messages. “Get your head out of the clouds!”. “You can’t do that! You don’t know how/don’t have the money/lack the skill!”. One by one, the dreams are crushed out of a child until they learn not to dream. By the time a child reaches their teen years, they cease to dream except in the most casual sense, and often, dreams are kept in silence.
Our greatest inventors and leaders have begun with nothing more than a dream, an idea that something could be done and that they held the power to do it. They failed and tried again and again before they found success. They also heard those who said that they should give up, that they shouldn’t try. They ignored those voices and pushed forward.
Society will not give way on this item. It rarely gives way as a whole in the first place. The individuals in a society can give way, though. They can decide that the society is wrong and stand up against it. One by one, act by act, individuals can begin the slow process of changing a society and making the acceptable become unacceptable. Stand up today. Listen to someone’s dream. Hear out their idea. Then, instead of acting as if that dream has no value, no meaning, show interest. Tell the dreamer you wish that you’d had the idea first! Then, ask the dreamer, “What will you do with it? Have you thought about how to make it happen?” Ask if you can help them.
