Tribe Life Tuesday: Don't Quit Your Daydream

Welcome to the tribe of daydreamers!

We’re all daydreamers, mind wanderers, and reality escapers, some are just more identifiable than others. These days there seems to be a lot of negativity around daydreaming, some even equate it to laziness. But for the next few moments, let’s go on an adventure.

Take a minute and picture the biggest dream your currently have…

Dream big.

The sky’s the limit!

Do you have it?

Awesome!

That, my friend, is an amazing dream!

Here are 2 of my dreams:
            1. Own a luxury plane ☺

            2. Adopt children from various countries and have a beautifully diverse family.

*If you feel comfortable sharing some of your dreams, please comment below, I would love to hear all about them! (You can comment anonymously too) *

Now that you have your dream in mind, let’s go after it. Let’s pretend for a moment that there is nothing holding you back. Imagine that you have endless resource, how would your dream change? Would it get larger?

It may seem far-fetched, even impossible, but I believe we can make these dreams happen! Two of my favorite words are “why” and “not”, so I have to ask you: Why not? Honestly, why not go for it? It may take a while and it will probably have some painful moments, but the dream is worth it, and more than that, the process is worth it!

The amazing Walt Disney once said, “All of our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them” and boy, does it take courage to follow a dream. It seems as though dreams are free in the mind and costly in our actions. Our dreams rarely take reality into account and it can be hard to balance the two. I find it particularly difficult to dream when I have a lot going on in my life or when I have experienced disappointment. During those times it feels like that precious, dreaming, mental space can be easily ransacked by the normal things of life like the job, my family, money, etc.

Dream space has to be fought for. I have to fight to get it back and fight to protect it from invasion. As adults, more accurately, “responsible” adults, the notion of daydreaming is too lofty and practicality is most important. But boy, oh boy, is that FALSE. The practical details of life are essential and they will ALWAYS be there but it is the splendor of dreaming that fills us with hope to keep going. My advice to you is: allow yourself to dream. Allow yourself to see what doesn’t exist, to believe in a bigger life, a life where anything is possible. Let’s break open the bottle of imaginative thinking and drink up!

Think that daydreaming is just for kids or anyone other than you? Think again! Even science backs up the practice of dreaming. Science says:

You daydream less as you get older.

Peter Delaney, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, has done extensive study on this and notes how daydreaming is the imagining of the potential future. But as we grow older and into adulthood, daydreaming slows, as if the future before us is shrinking.

Daydreaming turns off other parts of the brain.

Empathy and analytics are two key systems in our brains that keep us functioning well. When a tricky numbers problem comes up at work, the analytic side of your brain effectively shuts the empathetic side off to maximize your ability to solve the problem. There’s no room for empathy when you’re deep in analytics. But, when you’re daydreaming, your brain cycles beautifully through these systems seamlessly as they turn each other off.

Daydreaming makes you more creative.

Creativity is really just the association of things in a new or unique way. Oftentimes our daydreaming mind will be able to make connections that, if we were thinking about it, we would never come to.

If you want to learn more about what science has to say about day dreaming, check out this National Geographic article.

While daydreaming is wonderful and hold many benefits, I do know there should be a balance in everything. Dr. Kaufman, an NYU psychology professor and author, has advocated for each person to “balance your focused mind with your wandering mind. … The latest research on imagination and creativity shows that if we’re always in the moment, we’re going to miss out on important connections between our own inner mind-wandering thoughts and the outside world. Creativity lies in that intersection between our outer world and our inner world.” To learn more about Dr. Kaufman’s thoughts, check out this article.

I want to leave you with this: to dream is to explore untapped realities, to lend your soul to ideas and concepts that have yet to hit the real world. I encourage you to reflect on the world around you, visualize your big, bold, bright future, and let that passion fuel you to take a step. You have great dreams inside you that are just waiting for you to be courageous. I believe in you! You can do it!

Thank you for dreaming with the Tribe today!

See you next Tuesday.

~Carrie