The Gap between Reality and Fantasy

I have been thinking much lately about the gap in my own life between the dream life - call it imaginings - and the reality of what it is. I think everyone probably has some level of this, from the very simple dreaming of a better physcial circumstance to those who have created whole fantasy lives online through online gaming.

There is some inherent element as well to the documented "Peter Pan Syndrome", a general term which covers the fact that it seems that many people have a form of extended adolescence, living in a sort of world where one extends being a teenager by 10, 20, or 30 years.

For myself, I think that the imaginings and the worlds that exist within them are more a reaction to the life that I am in - the very things that I imagine and see are seemingly the very things that I cannot control or feel powerless about in my own life.

The concern is that these things start to become more real than reality itself.

If you were ever a hopeless romantic, you know well of what I speak: the girl whom you liked in high school (you never had a date), who was nice to you once or twice, on which experiences you built this whole construct in your mind about "What would it be like?...", never knowing (or knowingly ignoring) the fact that they 1) Really didn't seem to know you existed; and 2) Were in practice very different from what you had imagined.

And then there came that point - that point always comes - where your imagined relationship hit the rocks of reality, and you ended up floating to shore (again) on the wreckage of your dream, spitting seaweed and sand out of your mouth - yet already seeing the next ship of dreams in your mind.

It happens with relationships, jobs, finances, conversations - almost anything where there comes a gap between what you thought and what you have.

My question is: Are my desires to much, or are they too little? If I am imagining about things that are not in my life, are there elements I can bring in? Is one doomed only to dream, and never to experience?