Dreaming Great Dreams

"The mightiest works have been accomplished by men who have somehow kept their ability to dream great dreams." - Walter Russell Bowie

How does one transfer a dream into reality?

Or let's start one level higher: how does one realize a dream that is real and can be accomplished?

The reality is that we all have a number of dreams, some which are "Escape Dreams" (as defined by Barbara Sher in her book I Could Do Anything I Want If I Only Knew What It Was as a dream which we use to escape reality but is indicative of something that we are missing in our life), some which are Real Dreams (but seem out of reach) and the pedestrian "Dreams" that we so often seem to settle for instead of our Real Dreams.

So let's agree that we are talking about Real Dreams versus Dreams: those dreams we have which are things which can be accomplished but are seemingly impossible given our ordinary lives versus those dreams we have which we think we can accomplish, which often turn out to be less than what we can do or our capable of.

That said, what prevents us from turning Real Dream into reality?

I think the two biggest impediments to this are 1) Self Belief; and 2) Rigid Thinking.

1) Self Belief: If you don't believe you can accomplish it, you won't. This is the core statement of any books on success you will read (trust me on this - I've read enough of them!). There are any number of ways to accomplish this, either by autosuggestion (writing out your goals every day 10 times), constantly keeping them in your mind, or imaging/focused dreaming (a la Psychocybernetics by Dr. Maxwell Maltz) - but the bottom line is that you must believe you can accomplish it somehow.

2) Rigid Thinking: Once you overcome doubts that you can, the second great trap is deciding how it will be done. So often we think that something must be performed in a particular fashion and that if it cannot be performed in that fashion, it can't be done. We need to be open to the fact that there are multiple ways to reach our dreams - but we have to be alert enough to see the unorthodox opportunities that may exist for accomplishing them.

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And so on. It seems to me that so many people who have the self belief waste their energy and time on the one path they think they must take, much like a salmon going upstream which ignores the fish ladder and continues to butt its head against the dam because that's the way it has always gone.

So do you believe? And can you accept there are other ways to do things? If can do these and keep your Real Dreams alive, you're on your way.