Somewhere along the way, I stopped dreaming. I doubt it was this particular day that I have mentioned, but maybe another like it. Or maybe it was a gradual progression of dreaming less, and “adjusting myself” to be more “practical” or pragmatic. I didn’t notice it at the time, and it was only recently that I came to realize that something was missing. I had taken the Myers Briggs test, and the personality profile categorized me as an idealist, and suggested that one of my primary motivations is to think intuitively: to ponder not just about how things are, but also how they could be; to dream! My counselor / interpreter explained that my general personality type was highly adaptive, I could get through life doing things I wasn’t wired to do. She used the example of my writing with my left (opposite) hand, and suggested that while I could do it, just think what it would be like if I could start proactively living according to my wiring, like writing with my right hand! Just imagine what a person, wired to dream, could dream up if encouraged to pursue and embrace the activity!
Dreaming is not just for idealists. Somewhere along the way someone told me that, “without hope in the future, there is no power in the present”. I believe that if we lose our dreams, we lose our hope. If we lose our hope, we perish. Maybe we don’t literally disappear, but we stop living on purpose, and we begin to coast through life in a state of numb compliance with our surroundings. For some this might be a disengaged contentedness, but for others, despair.
