Are you ASHAMED of your daydreams?!

I watched a movie in preparation to write this. Not a great one, but worthwhile.

It’s called “The Professor and the Madman” with Mel Gibson playing the Scottish autodidactic philologist James Murray who drove the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary in the late 1800s, and Sean Penn as the schizophrenic American army officer who submitted more than 10,000 definitions from an insane asylum. It’s a story of obsession, workaholism, murder, love, and friendship. In spite of its disappointing quality, it gave me insight into the process of cataloging those beautiful bite-size units of meaning we call words and tracing their origins through an unbroken succession to the present day.

Watch that movie and I guarantee that at the very least you will never look at a dictionary the same way again. It’s a good thing. One of those miracles of human achievement we take for granted, and it wasn’t compiled that long ago.

The reason I wanted to watch this - many years ago I looked up a certain word and was fascinated by the definition. It made me marvel at the art of crafting definitions to be succinct, comprehensive, and accurate.

The word is “daydream”.

The definition, according to the American Heritage College Dictionary, 3rd ed., is: “A dreamlike musing while awake, esp. of the fulfillment of wishes.”

It was the second part of the definition that struck me. I had never realized that. Most of us know it intuitively, which is why we say things like…

“stop dreaming and face reality”
“in your dreams”
“you may say I’m a dreamer”

These phrases have connotations of delusion and an inability to face reality.

Isn’t it notable, though, that we have this unconditionally positive class of human thought experience? Night dreams aren’t like that. We find them bizarre, surreal, even terrifying. But daydreams? Happy to hang out there. And then we’re taught to feel guilty about imagining an unrealized ideal.

But, you know what? All progress begins this way. Search your daydreams for hints of your ideals. Like fingerprints, they are uniquely yours.

Here’s a little nuance to this. Daydreams tend to violate the sensibility of the Protestant Work Ethic, which is obsessively humble. Since we star in our daydreams, we are taught to be suspicious of them.

But, there’s a paradox here. Every successful star of anything only got that way by offering others incredible value. The question “What do you want?” ALWAYS leads to what we want for others as well. So, embrace your daydreams, and clarify their content on 5 levels:

GLOBAL
COMMUNITY
TEAM
FAMILY
SELF

This will help you start turning your dreams into workable and pursuable strategies. Again, the self level is a paradox because it automatically leads to the other 4. Pay attention to your daydreams - they tell you what you want, and that always means serving. I give you permission to start realizing them 🙂