You are expected to dream. It is not optional. You must have a vision board, a ten-year plan, a goal ladder, a story you can tell yourself about where all this is going. If you do not dream, you are depressed. If you dream wrongly, that is: too big, too small, too impractical, too utopian… you are a liability to your brand. It is not enough to live. You must aspire. Aspire, you must. Dreaming, in the modern sense, is not the mysterious whisperings of the soul: it is a deliverable.
Butt the dream has become a document. We file it with HR. We pitch it at drinks. “Where do you see yourself in five years?” they ask, “Where!?” as if the future were a subdivision you could rent. The dream is what you barter in place of a personality. It is a story you rehearse in the shower and polish on your LinkedIn. It is made of the same pixels as the ad that sold you toothpaste for ambitious people.
But the truth is most of us don’t actually dream. We hallucinate the future. We do not lie awake at night gripped by terrible visions of the infinite; we lie awake because the notification light is blinking in the dark like the eye of a vengeful god. What we call dreaming is just the afterimage of our own consumption, smeared like Vaseline across the horizon.
And the real horror? Somewhere along the way, we stopped dreaming because we wanted to, and started dreaming because we had to. The job interview is a dream test. The yearly homecoming is a dream test. Even the therapist wants to know your dream…. No one asks what haunts you. No one asks what calls to you from the bones of history. You are permitted only upward longing, never horizontal despair.
This is not dreaming. This is ambition in drag.
Where are the dreams that ruin you? Where? The ones that arrive like a dog in the road, jaw dripping with meat? Where are the dreams you could never say aloud because to speak them would invite exile, or worse, marketing? The real dreams are inconvenient. They arrive at 3:42am, soaked in sweat, holding the hand of someone who doesn’t exist anymore. They tell you to burn your degree. To disappear into the mountains. To write that thing you are not qualified to write. To love someone who will never love you back. To commit yourself to a god who does not reply.
And you try to shrug it off. But it lingers. Like smoke in your clothes. Like guilt in your smouldering soul.
This guide is not for the careerist, nor the manifestor, nor the type of person who describes themselves as a “lifelong learner.” This guide is for those who still believe (quietly, against the data/against all that habors that special type of misery-bordom) that to dream is to let a hole tear open in the fabric of the given. That a true dream is an act of metaphysical violence. That to dream honestly is to risk unmaking the self that dreams.
You want to dream of the future? Fine. But know this: the future is not what comes after now. The future is a stalker. The future is already behind you, breathing down your neck, muttering things you can’t quite hear. You don’t summon it. You don’t manifest it. You catch it, out of the corner of your eye, rifling through your memories like a burglar.
And when you turn to look: it’s gone. But something’s missing. And you know, somehow, the price of dreaming has already been paid.
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