In dreaming there is a lot of hidden unconscious negativity. A lot of dreams don’t happen for a lot of people, so they don’t bother to dream. A dream not coming true brings disappointment. How many times can you endure this? It’s like reliving our teenage years of unrequited love. You want the girl (or boy), you dream about her, you visualize walking hand in hand with her, and you finally (maybe) work up the courage to talk to her, and you realize she does not entertain even remotely the same idea. In fact, she doesn’t even know your name. How many times can we go through this process of love and agony?
In my late teens, early twenties, I went through a much more elaborate process of trying to transcend from friendship to intimacy with three different young women (not all at the same time). Each of those relationships lasted a few years. Had I let the disappointments get the better part of me, I might as well have ended up as a monk. You see, in the end, many of us protect ourselves by not dreaming. We don’t fly too high. We don’t have silly thoughts. We fly low to the ground. And we build up a life.
Even if you gave up dreaming long ago, pretend for at least as long as you’re reading this book that you didn’t give it up. Just have fun and play along. Hide the book under your mattress if you want. Nobody but you needs to know.
How round is your Wheel of Life?
What if it’s been so long you don’t even know what to dream about?
For the two categories of people who don’t dream – those beaten down by years of being denied their dreams, and those so super-successful that there’s nothing left to want – let me introduce an exercise that can help. I call it the Wheel of Life. It’s a wheel, because it is supposed to be round – it’s supposed to roll smoothly when our life is well balanced. But most of us won’t have wheels of life that are neatly round. So when you get (as you probably often do) into the fast lane of life, the unbalanced wheel gives you a real bumpy ride. Also, beware that a major deficit in any one area of life can and will eventually break the whole wheel.
Imagine four axes. Self to the north and Material side of life to the south. East is Relationships with others and west is Work life.
I’m going to ask you to rate your subjective levels of satisfaction on a one to ten scale for each of these areas. When giving yourself a score, consider the state of affairs in each area of your life. How satisfied or happy are you?
Self means your physical health, your fitness, your mind, your hobbies and time just for yourself. It also means your relationship with yourself. On a deeper level, it relates to your emotions, subconscious thoughts, your self-concept. Going even deeper it has to do with the spiritual side of life, your soul, your light. So ask yourself – how satisfied am I with myself, on a scale of one to ten? And do not give yourself an easy eight, nine or ten – be honest, rather conservative and quite demanding. In order to help you pick a score, here are some questions:
Are you healthy all the time? Or are you often sick? Are you in the best shape of your life? Or are you a slug or a couch potato? Is your mind quick and agile? Or does it feel foggy, and you find it difficult to concentrate? Do you have some hobbies or ways to spend your leisure time you find fulfilling? Or do you spend hours watching bad reality television or staring at the computer screen – regardless of whether you read Facebook entries of semistrangers, watch YouTube videos, or play computer games? How much do you like yourself, really? How high is your self-esteem?
The Material side of life can make life much less stressful and can also make you worry. Do you have no financial worries whatsoever? Or can you hardly make both ends meet? Do you make enough, compared to the standard you set for yourself? At the end of the year, after all the necessary and sinful expenses, is there much left? How about your investments? Are they profitable? Or have you not even made or thought about investments? Do you have too many unnecessary things? Or do you have no things at all? Do you give generously? Or do you think only of yourself?
How far are you from your ideal in that area of life – The Material side of life, as we labeled it?
Relationships with others means the presence or absence of your human relationships and the quality of the existing ones. Is there a significant other in your life? How are things with your spouse? Do you laugh together a lot? Do you argue too much? How about your children? If you have kids, are you friends with them? Or do you find it often too difficult to relate to them? Or if you have no kids, do you wish you did? How are your relations with your parents? Or friends? Do you see or talk to them often enough? Or are you already beginning to forget their faces? How satisfied are you with your relationships on a scale from one to ten?
Work life means your job, vocation or business. Is what you’re doing now really for you, your true calling? Or are you just marking time and picking up a paycheck? How good are you at what you do? Do you achieve most of your work goals? Half of them? None? Do you like the team you work with, or do most of your colleagues irritate you?
Imagine that ten is ideal for each of these categories. As good as you could imagine it. Zero is the worst extreme. When you’ve drawn two intersecting axes, let zero be where they intersect. Ten is some point equidistant from the intersection along each of the four rays.
As an example, let’s say you are pretty happy with Self and you give yourself eight points out of ten. Your Work life is good (despite the fact that you dislike many of your colleagues) and you give yourself a seven. Material side of life is okay, but not great – a six. But Relationships with Others seem to suffer. You spend very little time with people who mean most to you. You give yourself a three. Then your Wheel of Life isn’t going to look much like a wheel. It will resemble a loaf of homemade bread. And it won’t roll very well when you attach it to your wagon. Your mission is to expand that flat area – a target area for dreaming – and make your wheel round. A life of balance is a life that is good.
If all four dimensions are only average, then my guess is that your Wheel of Life may generally roll pretty smoothly. At least it is round and balanced. However, maybe your level of joy and satisfaction is way below what really satisfies you. And if you happen to run into a pothole with this small wheel, it will really feel shaky. In this case your mission will be to grow each segment in a balanced fashion.
Dream on
Now, let’s go back to dreaming.
Let’s start with a cliché. Not too many people would knock a house in the suburbs with a nice garden. Two cars in the driveway, 1.5 kids and a dog and a lawn. A nice flat screen LED television set – maybe even 3D, more than one if you want. Cable TV with lots of channels. Good educations for the kids. A summer home. A vacation somewhere warm each year. What else could you want? (Some wise guy always says: I don’t want a lawn, I want an apartment. Okay. You can have your apartment. This is a gross generalization, anyway.)
I think I need to point out that this cliché is not a cliché for many people in the world, though it probably will be for many who read this book, because chances are you are residing in the relatively affluent western world. You may not have all of it, but you probably already have some form of it. I raise the issue of a cliché because I want you to really dream outside your normal frame of reference. You are, after all, dining at Restaurant la Vie. And if this petit bourgeois still life does not interest you, and you know what you want instead, then I sincerely applaud you. Standing ovations and congratulations.
There’s a story I like by the writer Stanley Bing. He writes about interviewing young people for a job in his company and posing the question: What would you really like to be doing? All the kids answer in corporatespeak. They give him mumbo-jumbo about wanting to “interface with partner peers” or wanting to “assimilate effectively into the corporate culture” or “market a product inside the complex matrix of the branding mix.” Bing then stops the applicants and explains that that’s not what he’s asking. He wants to know what they’d really like to be doing. But they don’t get it. Bing finally gets fed up with one kid and suggests that perhaps he’d rather be at home having sex with his girlfriend