Remaking Your Dreams When You've Lost Them

Kids dream a lot. They daydream, they envision themselves as kings, queens and heroes. The lines between reality and imagination are still blurred, magic exists around festivals. Fairytales might as well be real — who says they aren’t?

For many of us, this childlike wonder disappears as we grow up and have to deal with life’s realities. In the extreme, dreams become equated with illusions and anything that is beyond one’s personal horizon turns into vain fantasy. Hopes and dreams make way for a complete surrender to a reality that is taken as given, as unshakeable.

That is the most direct track to grim cynisism and an unlived life.

Keeping the ability to dream alive

Dreaming is imagining how things might be if we relax constraints. For kids, many of those constraints are not in place yet, simply because they haven’t made the necessary life experiences. This unconstrained nature leads to dreams that may be wildly disconnected from any shared reality with other humans. But that is imagination going on a trip.

We all have different preconditions, life experiences and genetic makeups. Some are content with seeing themselves as stark realists in any domain, others spend hours and hours fantasizing while never making the least effort to take any steps toward fulfilling their dreams.

Often, growing up comes with the connotation that now, it is time to stop dreaming and “get real”. And indeed, if we never take action, nothing happens. But all too often, we just end up completely losing sight of what it is we dream about. That is when everything becomes mundane, boring sh*t piles up on more boring sh*t, we lack motivation but keep going along and soon wonder why. Ultimately, we need to survive and when we have no more dreams, that is all we are really doing.

Now, I know it can be stressful to feel like you need to “follow your dreams” and “find your passions”. I think there’s a lot of unhelpful and superficial rhetoric around these topics. It’s okay not to know what you’re passionate about. It’s okay not to have a clear dream right now. It’s okay to have had ten different passions in the past ten weeks (I’m prone to that).

Dreams can change. I’ve wanted to be an actor, a journalist and a scientist among others at different points in my life. Now, I don’t dream of labels or ideas that much anymore. Instead, I try to envision the kind of life I would love. What attracts me and what repels me.

You don’t (re)discover your dreams by just thinking really hard. We evolve as human beings. Especially if you’re curious, novelty-seeking and more preoccupied with expression and meaning than with money and status, what you care about might change a lot.

What even are dreams?

I used to think of dreams as a stable, faraway world, where everything is perfect. Now, I think of them as the essence of the truest expression of ourselves at one moment in time. As we change, they change. As we move closer to this expression, we become more aligned with ourselves, but we may also notice how something doesn’t quite fit anymore. How we’ve outgrown part of our dreams. At that point, it’s not us that need to adapt, but our dreams.

This expression isn’t out there in some sacred space. It’s right with us at any moment in time. We just need a way of accessing it. That’s what I mean by “we don’t get to it just by thinking really hard”. Expression is holistic. It’s not a skill. It’s the stuff that needs to get out, no matter what. Expression through moving our bodies differs from expression through writing which is different from the kind of expression that emerges when we get so immersed in a conversation that we lose all sense of time.

But if dreams are ultimately an image of the expression that is most true to us right now, that means that at times they will tend to change rapidly. When we undergo a lot of volatile (e)motions, it only makes sense that we don’t move in the same direction all throughout. It also means that dreaming and self-discovery are intricately tied together. When we don’t quit dreaming entirely, we get to find out a bit more about who we are every day. It’s not our concrete dreams that are central, though we have a kind of fetishistic attitude toward the one immutable dream that we hold on to at the expense of everything else.

I think that is unhelpful romantization. I’m very prone to romanticising and I’d rather be a hopeless romantic than a pragmatic realist who considers imagination a crime. But the idea of the one dream we are supposed to have is incredibly limiting.

Just experiment! Don’t worry when it’s unclear what you dream about right now or if you feel lost. Go out and dance, make new experiences, go travel, talk to strangers. Go do some impro theater, join an art class or perform open-stage standup comedy if that calls you. The more attuned we get, the more we notice which activities are in that sweet space — highly attractive, slightly scary, somewhat beyond our comfort zone. These are totally the right goalposts to follow. Just go along, do the things that draw you in but are a bit (or quite) uncomfortable. The feeling in the moment and afterwards tells you a million times more than any extensive analytical thought process.

One area where I think pure thought can actually be helpful in connecting to your dreams are childhood memories. Not in the sense of psychoanalyzing the hell out of your own childhood. Instead, think back, maybe talk to siblings, parents or anyone who knew you as a kid: what did you enjoy the most? What did you feel drawn to? Would you spend long hours running around, painting, playing with lego or dressing up?

It might sound a bit silly at first glance, but I do think there is something fundamental that we can learn about ourselves from reconnecting to what attracted us back then. Because we were, well, unconstrained. There weren’t many complex external influences and rules telling us we needed to do A over B. I remember the sheer amount of games we invented and how we would always make up our own rules as kids. Some of this has absolutely stayed with me: I dream of a life where I can create and follow my own rules. That, for me, is connected to a life of freedom and, practically speaking, self-employment.

Final thoughts

You don’t need to find your one dream today, tomorrow or ever. You might have a number of different smaller dreams, you might have none today and five in a month. Just experiment. And train the ability of imagining how things could be different. Daydreaming has a bad reputation in some circles, but it is absolutely vital to creative thought and imagination. Putting measures into place to work toward your dreams and achieve goals on the way is a different story. It requires different skills. But those skills are irrelevant if you have no idea where you want to be going. Start by relearning how to dream.

If you’ve lost your dreams, first follow that which makes you feel like a kid again.

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