samng.me

Dream big

My sons,

One of my favorite games to play with you when you were young was the sleeping game. It was a silly little game that was designed to get you two to stay still and quiet for as long as possible. The game was simple - everyone lays down and sleeps, and the first to move around or to make noise loses. Not a very creative game, I know, but hey, I was a young dad who needed some peace and quiet, and you two were these tiny, loud, and rambunctious little things.

That didn’t change the fact though that I love sleeping. All my life, I’ve always loved sleeping. I slept a ton as a teen, and even as a young adult I’d spend Saturdays sleeping in as long as I can. The primary reason I loved to sleep? I loved dreaming. I loved the feeling of waking up from a wonderful dream and laying there, languishing in the feeling, trying to hang on to the last traces of it as consciousness permeated through.

One of the reasons I love dreaming is that dreams suspended reality. They allow my mind to build worlds, to create scenarios, to fully live out relationships and fanciful experiences that my real life didn’t enable. They open my mind, expand my horizons, and give me space to freely explore things that otherwise seem impossible. They provide an escape when I need, but most importantly they embolden me to think about the world as it ought to be, or even as it could be, instead of as it is. And then to do something about it.

Shaping our dreams

As I’ve looked back on my dreams over the years, I’ve recognized that they have been largely shaped by the inputs that I had in my life at any given time. The obvious (and probably mortifyingly funny) ones were the ones about girls. Yikes. My teenage years were filled with romantic flights of fancy with my crush of the day (and yes, there were many!). Combined with a healthy intake of rom coms (“She’s all that” starring Rachael Leigh Cook was my teenage favorite) and sappy love songs (“Kiss me” by Sixpence none the richer), I imagined many a sunset walk on the beach or a picturesque convertible joyride through the hills.

As I thankfully moved past those years, my college life of computer science, helping out younger class mates, and learning to ride motorcycles moved my dreams in those directions, and I found myself dreaming of working at Microsoft, of being an adjunct professor, and of exploring the continent on a motorcycle. Graduation brought dreams of success, of starting a family, of having two wonderful children, and of finding my place on the long road of adulthood.

But then a strange thing happened. I began to read more. I began to deviate my life from the daily grind, and began to fill my mind with books and with the ideas that those books brought about. While my childhood and adolescent reading was primarily filled with fiction which helped me dream of new worlds and encounters, and my regular, socially accepted inputs like watching Friends for a decade filled my dreams with common and relatable topics, in my thirties I started to really read. I read to learn, I read to grow, I read to become a better person.

Books like Mindset by Carol Dweck, The top five regrets of the dying by Bonnie Ware, When breath becomes air by Paul Kalanithi, Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella, and Infectious Generosity by Chris Anderson again shifted my dreams, this time in a much more elevated fashion. My dreams now turned to making an impact on our world, on figuring out how the world ought to be, and on finding my place and impact in it so that I could leave the world better than when I entered.

And slowly but surely I became convinced that we can shape our dreams. By controlling our inputs, by being intentional about the things that we exposed ourselves to, and by being staunch guardians of the inputs we allowed to influence us, we can guide and direct our dreams to topics and explorations of ideas that we want. Instead of allowing the activities of our subconscious minds to be governed by things like media (traditional or social), advertisements, and the general pessimistic and sensationalistic existence that is our societal norms, we can endeavor to shape and guide our unconscious thoughts and musings intentionally and according to the things that we value.

How do we do this?

We need to first recognize the impact that our daily experience has on our dreams. The environments we’re in, the worries that we have, and the set of activities we apply our efforts to in our conscious and waking moments all impact what our minds expand on in our subconsciousness.

One of the most beautiful characteristics about the human race is our ability to dream, to be inspired, and to find our own meaning and purpose for life. We do not merely exist and carry out our physical functions; no, we take those functions and try to assign meaning, to derive value, and to create joy in our experiences. The bigger we dream, the more our lives expand and the more rich our experiences become.

Dream big

So how do we then dream big? How do we get inspired, both consciously and subconsciously to take on bigger and better things? How do we go from a life that is rooted in the mundane experiences that our society places upon us - going to work, swiping up on your social media accounts, taking kids from place to place, and generally just running the rat race - to one that is uplifted, elevated, and expansive?

1. Notice your posture. Have you ever noticed that we spend an inordinate amount of time looking downwards? Whether it’s physically looking down at our phone screens and the like or metaphorically looking down on other people and on situations that we judge, we spend a lot of our posture looking downwards. Look up. Look up at the heavens, at the grandness of the world above and beyond us. Look up towards the inspiring stories of those who strive to elevate life, to make our world better.
2. Stop and smell the roses. We’re so busy with our lives that we never take time to rest, to have margin, to have space. When we force ourselves to smell the roses, when we turn our rat race running brains off, when we allow our conscious mind to lose focus and allow our subconscious to drift, we begin to rest. We begin to wonder. We begin to wander. We begin to dream.
3. Read. I firmly believe that reading is the most important thing a person can do. If there is only one thing that you learn from me in our time together, if there’s only one thing I can impart on your lives as you grow, my hope is that you learn to love reading. Read books on life, on philosophy, on science, on generosity. Read biographies, fiction, exposition. Read for fun to enjoy a lazy afternoon. Read for study. Read to learn. Read to dream.
4. Surround yourself with dreamers. We become like those around us. We adopt and elaborate upon the shared experiences with those closest to us. We can be lifted up, we can be anchored down. We can be inspired, we can be terrified. By surrounding yourself with dreamers and by creating times to discuss, to share, and to work out those dreams, we orient ourselves accordingly.

And so my boys, my hope for you, my dream for you, and my prayers for you are that you are dreamers, that you become men who both see the world as it is and as it could be, and that you be men of big dreams and even bigger actions to help us get there. I love you guys!