35 Days of Dares #5 Dare to Dream
Dare to visualize a world in which your most treasured dreams have become true.
Ralph Marston
When your dreams get crushed by rejection, criticism or failure it’s easy to give up and stop dreaming. Often our default is to avoid pain. So rather than ingrate our dreams, we snuff them out by stuffing them down into the recesses of our minds until they become a faded memory.
I had a trunk, not unlike this one, that I kept my scribbles and notepads for many years.
My creative writing teacher at uni was a world famous poet and she told me my writing lacked imagination in a very kind way. She was a gentle soul, but honest.
I taught creative writing and encouraged my students to send their work off to publishers, to enter competitions, to believe that they could pursue the dream of writing. All the while, I scribbled, putting my meagre offerings into a trunk.
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.
One day I sat in my study and my eyes were drawn to the trunk and I heard a voice in my head say, ‘Get your writing out of the trunk and throw the trunk away.’
What was that voice? Was it the voice of the dreams I’d stuffed away? Was it God?
I put off emptying that trunk as I took out bits and pieces of past writing. It was so bad, I couldn’t even enjoy it myself.
I had an idea to write a non-fiction book. Perhaps that would be easier than writing fiction. After all, I’m a pragmatist, not a dreamer.
The voice in my head spoke again. ‘Get your writing out of the trunk and throw the trunk away.’
On the third occasion, I gave the trunk away. It was a very nice trunk and I didn’t like to think of it ending up at a rubbish dump.
That was the beginning of truly living my dreams. Getting the work out of the trunk and telling my family I was a writer was the beginning of an adventure.
The adventure of making my dreams come true.
It wasn’t overnight, as I’ve shared previously in Dare to Stay, but the dreams ignited and became reality.
If you have something that’s been locked away, I dare you to take it out, examine it. See if it will ignite. I dare you to dream.
So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon seem inevitable. Christopher Reeve
