“Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become.” – As A Man Thinketh

The longer I live the more I realize how important it is that I always have a big dream in my life. Dreams are what cause us to bound out of bed in the morning instead of waking with anxiety or, even worse, apathy for the day ahead. When I don’t have a dream in front of me it’s easy to find fault with everything and self-pity comes easily.

There’s an easy explanation for why we’re not at our best when we don’t have a dream – we were created to dream. The Proverbs writer tells us that “without a vision the people perish.”

I’ve always liked a quote that I’ve heard attributed to both Oscar Hammerstein and Walt Disney, “If you don’t have a dream, how are you going to make a dream come true?”

So why is it so hard for some of us to dream? Or so tough to believe that our dream can come true? Perhaps for some of us it’s because we were programmed to “don’t get your hopes up.” While this was told to “protect” us, it had the opposite effect. For many years I wanted to believe in a dream (because I was created that way) but I was afraid of how I’d feel if I didn’t get my dream. I was afraid to “get my hopes up.”

So how do we start dreaming? Or how do we dream bigger? By changing our thoughts of course. Mark Victor Hansen, who says he’s read As A Man Thinketh more than 25 times, writes in his book Dare To Win, “If you know exactly what you want, you can have it…Look around you. The world is filled with abundance.”

A dream is nothing more than a thought or a series of thoughts. And James Allen tells us that “your circumstances may be uncongenial, but they shall not long remain so if you but perceive an Ideal (a dream) and strive to reach it. You cannot travel within and stand still without.”

And that’s worth thinking about.