I’ve always been a big fan of dreaming. While in conversation, I tend to flock towards those with big aspirations for their lives. My typical response to “How are you?” is often times, “Just livin’ the dream”. I’ve been blessed with a personality that loves to think strategy and innovation while the activator in me fights to push projects to completion. I work best with a group of both creatives and engagers.
This afternoon while sitting in a tea shop waiting for a video file to upload, I saw a cheesy inspirational piece of artwork in the men’s bathroom. (Side note: perhaps all of the bad art ends up in the men’s bathrooms because the likelihood of a man critiquing art is lesser than that of a female, and the likelihood of a man discussing bathroom atmosphere beyond flatulents and bombs being dropped is near impossible.) The artwork was written in mass-multitude calligraphy and read:
“if you can imagine it,
you can dream it.
Dream it
and you can
become it”
When I looked beyond the Kincaid-style of the text, I saw some pretty incredible value in this. Then I realized how often I use these words simultaneously. Imagine this. No wait, dream it! Maybe both?
After a bit of research, I summarized that to imagine is to experience something that you have not seen or felt before. To dream means you are in a deep slumber, your mind processing things that you have already experienced in one way or another. When I think in terms of creating, ideation, marketing, I typically drift to the “dreaming” language. Maybe all of us need to stop dreaming based on what we have seen on each other’s blogs and out in pop culture. It simply becomes a cycle of inspiration from which we pull our ideas solely out of someone else’s idea (but not quite Inception). But what if we all started imagining, then teamed up with a group of activator’s that remind us to stop “just imagining and start doing”. Can we become what we imagine, or is it only possible after we have dreamt about it?