‘How Can a Dream Come True If You Never Let Yourself Have One?’
“All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.” — Walt Disney
We were all born dreamers. When you were small, before about the age of seven, you lived almost entirely in a daydreaming state, what the science calls the Alpha brainwave state. In my book I explain how the gate to the subconscious sits wide open in those early years, and everything flows straight in. Your dreaming was your natural way of learning about the world.
Then, somewhere along the line, most of us got the message. Get your head out of the clouds. “Stop daydreaming.” “Be realistic.” As I write in the book, telling a child to stop daydreaming is one of the biggest mistakes we make, because we’re switching off the very thing that helps them grow. The dreamer in you never actually died. It simply got told to be quiet, and it has been waiting ever since for permission to speak again.
Do You Believe You Deserve a Dream?
Here’s a question I ask in the book, and it cuts deeper than it first appears: do you believe you deserve a better life? For so many of us, the honest answer, buried down underneath, is ‘no’. And when we don’t believe we deserve the dream, we never let ourselves have it in the first place. We reach for something better, then get pulled straight back, having somehow convince ourselves that ‘The Tip,’ the cluttered, familiar dumping ground of the mind is a safer place to be than ‘The Garden.’ Familiar darkness can feel more comfortable than unfamiliar light. That is the quiet trap.
The Voice That Kills It First
A dream rarely even gets the chance to fail. It gets killed long before that, by the voice inside. “Who am I to want that.” “I’ll only fail.” “I don’t deserve happiness.” In the book I describe this negative self-talk as a repetitive soundtrack playing on a loop in the mind. I often say to people: “if I spoke to you the way you speak to yourself, you would never speak to me again.”
That voice strangles the dream in the cradle, before it has taken a single breath. The work here is simply to notice it, and to see it for what it really is, not the truth, only an old recording that learned to play a long time ago.
Dreams Live in ‘The Garden’
There’s a reason a dream can’t take root while you’re living in ‘The Tip.’ A tip is noisy and crowded, full of things rotting and rusting, with no quiet corner to sit and think, let alone to dream. Nothing new grows there. A dream needs ‘The Garden,’ the fertile, sunlit space of possibility, where the soil is ready and there’s room for something to grow. When you tend your inner garden, you’re not only finding peace. You’re preparing the ground where a dream can actually live.
As I share in the book, questioning our self-limiting beliefs and trusting the power of the mind can unlock remarkable possibilities. Stepping into ‘The Garden of possibility’, rather than being dragged into the darkness of ‘The Tip,’ is exactly where true miracles begin.
Let Yourself Have It
So how do you begin? You give yourself permission first. Not permission to have it all mapped out, simply permission to want it at all. You don’t need to know the “how” yet. The how comes later, and it comes far more easily once the dream is allowed to exist in the first place.
There’s an old saying which I’ve always loved: ‘reach for the stars, and if you only make it as far as the moon, that’s perfectly okay.’ I come back to it often, because it quietly takes the pressure off. You don’t have to land the dream exactly as you first pictured it. Aim high, let yourself want the whole of it, and even what looks like falling short will carry you somewhere far richer than playing small ever could.
Hand the daydreaming child inside you the freedom that got taken away all those years ago. Practise the words that feel almost impossible to say at first: “I am worthy.” Then take one small step in the dream’s direction with a single manageable goal that points the way. Small is perfectly fine. Small is how every big thing that has ever been built began.
A Question to Sit With
This week, bring to mind a dream you’ve quietly talked yourself out of. The one you filed away as unrealistic or decided simply wasn’t for someone like you. Then ask yourself, honestly:
How can a dream come true if you never let yourself have one?
Let yourself have it. You don’t have to chase it down today. Just stop refusing it. Give it a small patch of soil in your garden, and see what begins to grow. Don’t tell anyone as they all have their own opinions and don’t see what you see in your dream.
Have a great week,
Michael
📖 Where the F*ck Do Our Minds Go? — Navigating the Paths Between Chaos and Clarity → Get the book