Dare to Dream

Dreams are never lost or stolen, only abandoned. It is never too late to create the reality you once envisioned for yourself, to live the life you intended to live, before daily life got in the way.

Hopes and dreams are as essential to living as much as your breath is essential to your physical existence! Without hopes and dreams, we stay stuck in mediocrity at best, and lose the will to survive, at worst. We just resign ourselves to being a passive non-participant in life — a spectator, if you will; we become numb, or apathetic, as we disconnect from our experience of living, and simply allow events and circumstances to happen to us.

Often victims of abuse or people in captivity will dissociate from their traumatic, and post-traumatic, experience, because they have lost hope and no longer dare to dream — they just exist and submit to what they believe is their fate. This strategy minimizes the pain and suffering they experience, both emotionally and physically, because they no longer identify with the trauma associated with the experience, much like someone who vicariously experiences something through passive observation.

Hope is a powerful motivator. It plays a major role in not only surviving a traumatic experience in the short-term, but also contributes to one’s growth and thriving post-trauma.

In his autobiographical book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Viktor Frankl credits his hopes and dreams as his sole means of survival against the Nazis, empowering him during his demoralizing and horrifying ordeal as…