Dreams in a Book

"If you were a relationship-type of a person, you would already have one." said my teen-age daughter some time ago. "You would become a marriage-breaker, if you did that." she said some other time when the man´s status would have been the famous not-totally-free.

I have committed myself to a special long-term project. There are several practical matters I can do to ensure its success. One of them is to define my dreams, to collect them as pictures into a special book or folder.

Making a dream book sounds a bit strange, but I know the process to be reasonable. Dreams keep projects alive. Without a dream it becomes impossible to change the status quo of the current life, especially so if you have passed the wild and adventurous years of your life. Dreams help us to define the goals and objectives and they in turn help us to decide what to do next. Just think how many times a day you decide what to do next!

Planning does not make anything concrete. Decisions do. Since June I have been planning to tidy up my car. However, until this very moment those plans have been pushed aside by my decisions to do something else - writing, for instance.

I have cut pictures of my dreams from old English and Spanish magazines. I have found out that defining dreams is easy as far as they are big enough and far-away enough. When they get closer to what I normally consider to be attainable I start to hesitate: "Do I really want that? What would it mean in practice to reach for this or that dream?" The step towards decisions starts to look frightening.

Obviously the process goes down to the question: "Who would I be if I did all that? Would I recognize myself?" In other words, dreams question your identity. When consciously defining your dreams, you start thinking who you are now and who you could also be - in the future. If the the possible identities look and feel too strange to you, you are not yeat ready to reach for them.

Being a marriage-breaker was not a tempting identity. It was very easy to cut the sprouts and roots of that relationship at the very beginning. If I now had an opportunity to become a relationship-type of person, what would I do?

I found a picture for my dream book that would have represented a relationship. I decided to put it aside. It is not in included in my folder.

The other day I had a nice talk with my book keeper. She asked if I have considered selling the house and moving into a flat. It would lower the housing costs.

She is not the only one to ask about selling the house. My normal answer is that the house is my children´s property. "And you are just a janitor." one of my friends commented on that.

Well, I´m not a very good janitor, as the house would need continuous repair. Anyway, what my book keeper was suggesting was what we normally do: We rather diminish the dreams than start changing the situation to correspond the original dream-size. Rather than selling the house I want to create ways to increase the income. And that needs to be fun!

What size are your dreams now? What is happening to them in the long-run? - Dreams are the stuff the future is made of. What have you decided to do next?