What Your Dreams Are Trying to Tell You
Somebody once told you to be realistic, and what you heard was that the part of you that imagines things is the part that causes trouble.
So the daydreams got quieter, and slightly guilty, and were never examined, which is a shame, because they were the most honest thing you had.
Daydreams do not lie the way goals do
A goal written on a form is a social document. It is shaped by what sounds reasonable, what your family would approve of, what you think a person your age should be aiming at. Some of it is yours. Some of it is not, and it is very hard to tell which.
A daydream has none of that. Nobody is watching. There is no version of it that is trying to impress anyone. Which makes it a much better signal about what you actually value, if you are willing to read it rather than dismiss it.
How to read one
Take a recurring one. The one that keeps returning, in roughly the same shape, for years.
Ask what you are doing in it
Not what you have. What you are doing with your hands and your hours. The having is often decoration. The doing is the signal.
Ask who is there
Alone, with a few people, with many? That answer alone rules out large categories of life, and people are often surprised by their own answer.
Ask what is absent
What does the daydream conspicuously not contain? Sometimes the real information is the thing that has been quietly removed, and that is worth knowing about your current life.
Ask what it would cost
Now, and only now, be realistic. Not to reject it. To find the version of it that is affordable, which almost always exists and is almost always smaller than the full fantasy and delivers most of what the fantasy was about.
The realistic part comes last
That is the whole ordering problem. Realism applied at the start kills the signal before it can be read. Applied at the end, it turns the signal into a plan.
Dream first, then decide, then design. That is why the Guidebook goes in that order.
Do you know what Traveler Type you are?
Everyone moves through life a little differently. Knowing your Traveler Type helps you see where you really stand, plan in a way that fits how you work, and act on your goals without fighting yourself. It takes about five minutes, and we email you the results.
