Build Your Dream to Last

A dream is not about becoming a new person. A dream is about relishing who you are right now, underneath all of the pain, noise, and circling thoughts.

Crepuscula glacialis (1997), Dorothea Tanning

This is a message for recent graduates. It’s also a message for people in their 20s, mothers in their 30s, successful business people in their 40s, stoners in their 50s, so-called failures in their 60s, retired recording artists in their 90s and everyone in between.

Listen up, you stubborn, impossible animals: If you have a dream, you need to renovate that motherfucker until it can fit into your hands. You need to to trim it down so it’s portable, and also so it doesn’t block your view of everything else in your life. You need a dream you can take with you everywhere. You need a dream that fits into a lot of different situations and scenarios: shove it in a baby carriage, squeeze it into your carry-on luggage, stuff it into your bra, smash it next to your credit cards. You need a gigantic dream that you can collapse into the size of a locket around your neck, and you need to make sure that it doesn’t rely on fame, money, attention, location, status, or luck.

Unfortunately, most people are confused about dreams, thanks to the loudmouths who are supposedly living their dreams. Celebrities, athletes, influencers, creatives, and leaders often talk about achieving their dreams by working their asses off for years while ignoring everything else in their lives including their spouses, friends, family members, and their own well-being and peace of mind. Now they have the big house and the magazine covers and the hot spouse. Now they have everything they’ve ever imagined in their wildest fantasies. LOOK AT EVERYTHING I HAVE! they tell you. LOOK AT IT, LOOK, LOOK! This is the surest sign that they no longer have a tight grip on their dreams. Their dreams have slipped out of their grasp, and all they have now is a bunch of stuff they don’t know how to feel about. They want you to admire their stuff so they feel better about their life choices.

Interestingly, right after proclaiming that they’ve achieved their wildest dreams through self-sacrifice, single-mindedness, and nonstop hustle, many famous, wealthy, or influential humans start to talk like their lives are a stressful maze of pressures. They start to fixate on negative feedback loops from disgruntled fans and rival artists. Drugs and confusion and Becky With The Good Hair enter stage left.

Unfortunately, most of us don’t notice how these big dreamers crash to the ground when their dreams abandon them. All we see is the glowing skin and spacious mansions and luxury collabs. This is true in part because many successful, famous people are hesitant to explain how claustrophobic and difficult life becomes, after you get everything you’ve ever wanted.

The happy ones are different. They sound more like normal people on the bus for a reason. Because they still have dreams that they’ve slowly reimagined and reinvented and carved down to a portable size. The peaceful ones create new dreams that give them more satisfaction and balance than their old dreams did. The passionate ones grip tightly to their dreams, even as they’re coming true, knowing that the spoils and side effects and noise and dust that kicks up around a dream are just a distraction, compared to the dream itself.

A dream isn’t an outcome or a finish line. A real dream is something you do with your body, mind, and spirit. A true dream relies on existing in a romantic state where your dream is yours, it belongs to you, it lives and breathes through you, it flows through your cells, it wakes you up at night, it enhances colors and smells and sounds, it reshapes each day, it calls you to action. A genuine dream conjures the spirits of the dead. When you’re in the grips of your dream, when you’re honoring its enormity, the sky is on your side.

This is why – and now I’m talking to you, a teacher or a janitor or a CEO or a kid in high school – you can never loosen your grip on your truest desires, your most brilliant and buoyant dreams, your most passionate convictions. Because when you honor your dreams, your body wakes up to the world. Your head floats above your neck, your eyes peel away from the ground or unstick themselves from your phone, your spine aligns itself with the trees, your imagination becomes unglued, unstuck, fluid, dynamic, playful. Your sense of humor returns, your body feels good, your senses awaken.

A dream ignites the core optimism inside you, the wonder that led you to explore as a baby, to scream with glee the first time you saw a duckling, to run and giggle and fall down on the ground for no reason. You were soft and gentle and full of light, round and fast and flexible, thrilled to be alive, ready for anything. Your dream reminds you of how you were born into the world, the shape you took before you learned to be practical and safe, the sounds you made before you learned to set your expectations lower and lower until you expected nothing at all, until you learned to act grateful for nothing, until you learned to act, pretend, manipulate, decide, until you moved your whole body and your spirit into the cramped studio apartment of your brain, until your head got darker and more cramped and more sad, until you learned to scold and shame the person you once were until that person disappeared completely, along with the desires and the passions you had, along with the jokes you used to tell and the faces you used to make, along with the joy and thrills and sadness and fears of being fully awake and alive.

A dream awakens sadness inside you along with joy. That’s why so many people abandon their dreams. They don’t want to remember how it feels to have your high expectations blasted to shreds. They don’t want to feel desire and longing and grief, mixed together incoherently. They don’t want to feel confused by their dreams anymore.

But without your dream, it’s hard to notice how much restless, vibrant beauty lives inside this day. Without your dream, it’s hard to feel this foggy morning inside your cells, and hard to wish for something so important to you that you can barely talk about it to anyone.

Without your dream, you are sleepwalking.

But keep in mind, this is the moment when the famous loudmouths who made a living off their dreams will convince you that anyone who doesn’t make a living off their dreams and become famous from their dreams and take selfies of their perfect skin next to bottles of miracle products thanks to their dreams is sleepwalking.

That is incorrect. Sleepwalking begins the second you start to confuse your material circumstances with your dreams. Sleepwalking isn’t incited by seeking gainful employment unrelated to your dreams any more than sleepwalking is caused by eating a sandwich or taking a nap. Survival doesn’t kill your dreams. Other people’s inattention or criticism doesn’t kill your dreams. You’re the only person who can kill your dreams.

You kill your dreams because you hate loving something that’s embarrassing – your dreams and yourself.

You kill your dreams because you hate wanting something beautiful that makes you look like a try-hard or a wannabe or an amateur or an outsider, all words created by people who lost their dreams along the way and wanted to draw thick lines between themselves and others in order to make themselves feel better, more important, more successful.

You kill your dreams because your desperation and your shame forced your dreams into some addictive or fantastical or escapist shape that tricked you into thinking you could feel the highs of having a big dream without feeling the lows.

You kill your dreams because you think they can only belong to someone else, someone hotter or richer or more talented or smarter or less damaged or more patient or more hard working than you.

You kill your dreams because you know that to engage with a dream is to completely attune yourself to your body, your purity, your strength, the force of your will, and also your greed, your impatience, your lust, your grief. You kill your dreams because you know that enduring those forces is hard work. Dreams require hard work, every single day, and the work doesn’t end until you’re dead.

The work is very romantic. It wakes you up. It feels tragic a lot of the time. You feel doomed. That’s how a dream will make you feel a big chunk of the time: FUCKED.

It’s hard to keep your dreams alive for this reason. Most people choose other paths. Most people choose sleepwalking.

You kill your dreams because you decided that you weren’t brave enough to keep dreaming, to keep feeling everything.

You kill your dreams because you define yourself as someone who doesn’t get to have dreams.

You kill your dreams because someone told you they were stupid dreams and you believed them and now you hate anyone who still has dreams because they remind you of a joy you once felt that you can’t feel anymore.

You kill your dreams because you hate feeling sad or uncertain, and dreams bring all of the feelings with them, because the stars and the sun and the trees and the spirits of the dead embody brilliance and joy and light but they also embody sadness and uncertainty.

You killed your dreams because you bought into the view that feeling passionate and playful and joyful and weird and mournful and angry and delighted was inappropriate and inconvenient past a certain age, and right now you’re supposed to be focused on your job, focused on your children, focused on saving for retirement, focused on your health, aging in place, dying slowly.

You killed your dreams because someone convinced you that you could either have a career or a partner or kids or money or a creative life or passion or joy but you could never have all of the above at once.

That person who convinced you that your dreams weren’t practical enough, that they were embarrassing, that they were unrealistic? That person killed their dreams, too.

Never take advice from anyone who killed all of their fucking dreams! Never listen to a DREAM ASSASSIN!

You can embrace your dreams. You can survive and feed yourself and fall in love while you do it. Do not for a second believe otherwise.

The only thing you have to remember is that no one is going to sit down and map out exactly how you’re going to balance your dreams with everything else in your life. If someone says they can do this for you – well, they’re going to show you how they did it. And that’s okay. But the truth is that the most resilient and reliable and flexible and useful way to cut a path through life while gripping your dreams very tightly is to TURN YOUR DREAM INTO A KIND OF RELIGION THAT FEEDS YOU.

You create your religion to fit your dreams and to fit your needs and to honor the spirits that will support you as you navigate through the wonder and hell of a life with dreams that are wide awake and alive inside you.

A dream isn’t “I will become a famous rock star.” That’s a finish line. A dream is “I will form a band. I will write songs. I will sing. I will feel like a rock star.” A portable dream is “I will walk through this day hearing the songs that float through my head, treating myself like the rock star I am, treating myself like someone who is capable of anything she sets her mind to, someone who can take a feeling and make a song from it, someone whose spine is aligned with the stars in the sky, whose imagination is bright and hopeful, someone who resists the aggression of this anxious world at every turn and replaces it with beauty and light and hope. And if all I have is sadness today, I will hum a song about sadness, and my day will feel as sad and romantic as it already is.”

When you ignore your dreams, you ignore reality.

So go write down your dreams and we’ll pick this up again next week.

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Thanks for reading Ask Polly! We are all stubborn, impossible animals and that’s why we’re so interesting and so frustrating! Be good to yourself and the other soft, sad animals around you as much as you can.

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