An Exercise in Dreaming

At any point in time, there are a hundred ideas flashing through my mind. They come so fast, the tiny me filing everything into appropriately labeled drawers in my brain often doesn’t have time to catch them all. I think my therapist calls this ADHD. I call it being a dreamer.

And boy, do I have a lot of dreams. When I was little, I’d look forward to car rides, even if we were just going five minutes down the road. I’d ask how long the drive was and then think to myself, “Okay, you have X minutes to daydream!!” Can we all take a second to hug our inner child? I cry.

The daydreams started out… mild. I’d daydream about having a pool that resembled the ocean in my dream house. Then I upgraded to daydreaming about owning the Hannah Montana closet. Then I’d daydream about performing on a big stage, with a huge crowd of people all entranced by me. As I got older, the daydreaming became less frequent, but it was always my go-to method for falling asleep.

When being an artist became my full-time job, I always approached each project with intention and a vision for every tiny detail. This is how I realized I was a creative director. I’d get an idea and be able to flesh out the entirety of what that idea’s world looked like. In truth, I was never satisfied with just dreaming. I enjoyed the physical act of creating because that’s where I got to bring the idea to life. I learned how to make giant flower costumes so I could make my giant flower people idea a reality. Subsequently, my work was able to provide me the means to make some of my other dreams a reality (not the Hannah Montana closet… *yet*).

But I relished this part—the dreaming. The ideating. The planning. It came easily to me after having practiced during car rides for all those years. In professional artist speak, this is called Creative Direction. And all of these ideas get put into a PDF that we call: decks, treatments, production books, etc. Essentially, it’s an elaborate PowerPoint, but I incorporate heavy design to make mine look more like coffee table books, because… well, I don’t know how to be normal.

In my career, I’ve made countless treatments for both personal and paid projects. Most recently, I even made one for my upcoming wedding. It’s the only way I can fully express my vision. What people don’t know is that for every fully realized project I make a treatment for, there are ten treatments I’ve made to pitch myself in a bidding war for a potential job I didn’t get or for a personal project that never got to be made. It’s hours of work no one pays me for. This is part of the hard reality of being an artist—there is a lot of time and energy that must be invested, sometimes with no visible return.

I’ve spoken to many young artists who dread this part of the work, often because they view it as a waste of time. And don’t get me wrong, I, of all people, would love to be paid for my time developing these extensive decks. Ideas are as valuable as the finished product. And yes, it is a risk to send a company or brand my ideas fully laid out, lacking only execution. But this is the nature of the game we play. We have to risk theft in order to have visibility. If I don’t put my work out there, I run the bigger risk of never being hired. How can someone hire me if they don’t know what my work looks like? How can I win a bidding war for a project if I don’t show them why my ideas are worth investing in?

This is part of a larger conversation and one I’ll save for another day. For now, I’ll focus on dreaming. Because I’m human too, and occasionally, all this dreaming with no end result can push me to a breaking point. Even with all my faith, hope, and optimism, I can have moments where my ability to dream doesn’t feel magical. It feels incessant… like a burden and not the gift I’m usually grateful to receive. It happens after seasons where I’ve only been in the ideating phase. When I’ve put together and submitted a handful of treatments for projects I got close to booking but never heard back from, or that just flat-out changed directions. I imagine myself chiseling away at a large slab of marble and never finding the subject inside it. I imagine myself planting a hundred seeds and never seeing a single bloom. It hurts to keep building worlds that may never be seen.

“This industry is not for the faint of heart,” my agent said to me on FaceTime. She’s absolutely right. No one pursues being an artist because it’s easy. We pursue it because we know we have no choice but to be artists. It’s our calling—we’re not in it for the money, though the money (when it comes) is very nice. But I’m only human, and I have my bad days where I want to give up and stop trying, in the hopes of avoiding disappointment.

Here’s what I’ve learned: disappointment is inevitable. It is also a perspective. Hear me out. When I think about how I’ve made back-to-back treatments for a handful of potential projects that I allowed myself to get excited about as I dreamt up every facet of the worlds I was building, only to be rejected, I can get stuck in a hole of devastation and disappointment. I can feel demoralized and discouraged from making yet another one. Or I can reframe it as an exercise in dreaming. That’s all this is. All these treatments, the hours spent putting pen to paper, fleshing out a vision, sketching designs, notes, ideas—it’s like training, but for creatives.

Athletes train daily for their game. Art should be no different. Sometimes we gather inspiration and soak in media to help us nail strategy and technique the way an athlete would watch plays in preparation for the next game. Sometimes we have to make things that fail and don’t come out the way we thought they would, the way an athlete has to run plays to figure out which is the winning way. The way I see it, all these projects I’ve developed over the years and never got to realize have been plays I’m running in preparation for the games I’ll get to play.

I’ve made treatments for personal projects that I never got to make because I couldn’t find funding or resources. I’ve made treatments for the literal Oscars, for a project that could’ve changed my life, but that I didn’t get. My point is, the stakes have been low, and the stakes have been high. It’s all been practice. Someday, I’ll be back in that room doing that job for the Oscars, and I’ll be ready because I’ll have put in the time, the faith, and the hours of preparation.

I have so much experience in dreaming. And if dreaming is a discipline, I have so much practice in developing a concept and building a world. I could practically do it in my sleep. What used to take me weeks now takes me days. And yes, sometimes it does get exhausting. Sometimes I hate the very same skill I love to take to the bank—my ability to dream. But we can’t just love things when they’re working out for us. I think it means more to love something, especially when it’s hard to hold.

I’m not here for short-lived success and accolades. I’m here for legacy. For impact. For putting goodness [magic] into the world. This is the long-term game I’m playing. I’ll train as long as I have to.

Thank you for being here. I’ve recently realized that paywalling posts has taken a lot of the joy out of writing for me. I get stuck in this anxious loop of deciding which pieces are “worthy” of being paid for and which aren’t. And then there’s accessibility, which matters deeply to me. I want what I’ve learned, and the art that’s come from it, to feel attainable.

So moving forward, I won’t be paywalling posts anymore. That said, I do believe this work is valuable and worthy of support. Supporting this space allows me to keep exploring what it means to be an artist—not just in one medium, but in all the ways they overlap, intertwine, and come to life.

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with love,