Do You Put Conditions on Your Dreams Too?

“Dare to dream.”

The kind of slogan that might make you think a little deeper if you are the kind of person that I am - someone who wants to see life in its pure existence, understand what we are really doing here, and how, somewhere along the way, we managed to complicate something that perhaps was never meant to be this complicated.

And lately I’ve been thinking about dreaming.

Not goals. Not vision boards. Not a carefully calculated five-year plan where every dream comes with a strategy, timeline, budget, and enough evidence to prove that it is actually achievable. I mean dreaming.

The kind we knew how to do as children.

When I was little, I could lie in bed and imagine a hundred ways my life might turn out beautifully and unexpectedly different from how it started. I didn’t need proof. I didn’t need to know how. I could disappear into another possibility and somehow feel the peace and joy of it before any of it existed.

And it makes me wonder: When did we forget how to dream without conditions too?

Without limits. Without restrictions. Without immediately asking whether something is realistic, achievable, sensible, or even possible.

As children, we somehow have this inborn quality of believing we can do almost anything. We dream big. Expansively. Beautifully.

We believe we can become whoever we wish to become. We believe in true love, fairytales, adventures, happily-ever-after kinds of love. We imagine extraordinary lives without needing evidence that we deserve them or instructions for how exactly we are going to get there.

A child can tell you they are going to become an astronaut, live in a castle, have twelve dogs, travel the world and marry the love of their life, and there is no internal committee immediately presenting a PowerPoint on why this is statistically unlikely.

They just believe.

Until someone else starts telling us what to think. What to dream. What to fear. What isn’t realistic. What we should avoid. What we need to protect ourselves from.

How many times have you heard:

Trust no one.

Everyone is ultimately out for themselves.

You can only truly rely on yourself.

Don’t expect too much.

Don’t get your hopes up.

Life isn’t a fairy tale.

And what does that actually teach us? Maybe not only how to protect ourselves. Maybe it teaches us to expect less from life. To love with one foot out of the door. To want something while preparing ourselves not to have it. To dream while simultaneously explaining to ourselves why the dream probably won’t happen.

Perhaps somewhere along the way, we start dreaming with conditions.

I could have that, but only if…

That kind of love might exist, just not for me.

I could do that if I were younger, richer, more successful, more confident…

I’ll allow myself to believe in it once I see some evidence.

Maybe one day, when…

And on and on and on.

We slowly take something that was once limitless and squeeze it into the boundaries of what life has already shown us. And of course life does show us things. We experience disappointment, heartbreak, rejection, betrayal, failure. We make mistakes. We become more resilient, more cautious, more aware of everything that can go wrong.

And eventually we call that being realistic - we tell ourselves not to get our hopes up, not to romanticise, not to become too excited, not to want too much, not to imagine too far ahead. Because if we don’t dream too much, perhaps nothing can hurt us as much.

But what if, in protecting ourselves from disappointment, we also protect ourselves from possibility? What if some of the walls we built to keep pain out are also keeping wonder out? And then something rather ironic happens. We discover manifestation, visualisation, positive thinking, vision boards, abundance mentality.

We read books and listen to podcasts that teach us to expand our beliefs and imagine the life we desire. We practise dreaming and call it manifesting. We schedule it into our morning routine. We write affirmations to convince ourselves that things are possible. We almost have to train ourselves back into a mentality that once came naturally to us.

And I find that fascinating. Because what if this isn’t something new we need to learn? What if it is actually our natural way of being that we need to remember?

Before fear taught us to calculate everything. Before disappointment taught us not to expect too much. Before heartbreak taught us to imagine how things could go wrong, before allowing ourselves to imagine how beautifully they could go right. Before the world handed us a long list of what is realistic, sensible, appropriate, achievable and safe…

Maybe daydreaming and fantasising about life isn’t about escaping reality at all. And I’m not talking about living inside fantasy while refusing to see what is actually in front of us. There is a difference between imagining possibility and denying reality. I’m talking about allowing your mind to go somewhere beautiful without immediately inviting fear into the room to explain why you can’t have it.

To imagine what it would feel like to live from your heart rather than constantly negotiating with your fear.

Perhaps dreaming is simply connecting back to something incredibly natural within us - our desire to experience, create, love, explore, connect, contribute and live without constantly reducing ourselves to the limitations of what we already know.

There is something deeply human about imagining beyond what currently exists. And maybe we don’t need every dream to come true for dreaming itself to have value. Maybe some dreams remind us that our current reality is not the limit of who we can become or what we can experience.

But I think something else happens when we stop dreaming this way. When we lose connection to something bigger than our ego, we lose connection to our heart, our soul, our sense of purpose, our ability to imagine a life beyond what we can immediately see, measure, achieve or consume...

We start looking for it somewhere else. And perhaps that is where things get messy.

Because if nothing bigger is pulling us forward, smaller things become incredibly powerful: the next achievement, the next purchase, the next promotion, the next trip, the next person, the next swipe, the next compliment, the next notification, the next follower… Something outside of us that somehow starts to create the meaning we lost within.

The next thing to make us feel successful, wanted, attractive, interesting, accomplished, loved… or simply something for a moment. And none of those things is inherently wrong.

Success feels good. Pleasure is part of being alive. Wanting beautiful things, experiences, recognition, sex, money, excitement, or achievement doesn’t make us shallow. But perhaps the problem begins when those things become our primary source of meaning. When we stop dreaming big enough to have something deeper pulling us forward, we start needing smaller things to keep giving us little reasons to feel alive.

Quick gains. Short-term successes. Temporary validation. Constant dopamine search.

And then another. And another. And another.

The high wears off, so we need the next one. The new thing becomes normal, so we need a better thing. The attention fades, so we need more attention. The relationship becomes familiar, so perhaps there must be someone more exciting. The holiday ends, so we need another escape. The achievement becomes yesterday’s news, so we need another achievement to prove that we are still moving somewhere.

We call it ambition. We call it freedom. We call it keeping our options open. We call it living our best life.

But sometimes, perhaps, we are simply starving for meaning and feeding our stimulation instead. And stimulation is a terrible substitute for meaning because it never stays full for very long.

Maybe this is partly why silence has become so uncomfortable. Why being alone with ourselves can feel unbearable. Why we reach for the phone without even knowing why. Why boredom feels like something that needs to be fixed immediately. Why genuine intimacy can sometimes feel more frightening than casual connection. Why committing deeply to another human being, to a purpose, to a path, to something bigger than ourselves can feel strangely threatening in a culture that constantly reminds us that there could always be more… More options. More experiences. More pleasure. More people. More success. More stimulation. More fish in the sea. Greener grass somewhere else.

And somewhere in all that more, we might have lost touch with the difference between wanting more from life and constantly wanting more things in life.

One expands your life.

The other can become an endless attempt to fill it.

We have become incredibly connected to our bodies, our looks, our pleasure, our individual desires and our right to pursue whatever feels good to us. Yet, perhaps, underneath all that freedom and stimulation, something much quieter is starving.

Call it soul. Call it heart. Call it meaning. Call it purpose. Call it whatever feels true to you.

But there is a part of us that cannot be permanently satisfied by another purchase, another achievement, another beautiful body, another person wanting us, another number on a screen or another quick hit of pleasure. Because maybe we were never meant to experience life only through the question:

What can I get next?

But some of the deepest meaning comes from entirely different questions.

What would make this life feel meaningful even if nobody applauded it?

And perhaps dreaming used to connect us to those questions before the world taught us to reduce our dreams to goals, outcomes, possessions and proof of success. Because when you allow yourself to dream expansively not only about what you want to have, but about how you want to live, love, connect, contribute, experience and become, your life begins stretching beyond the next little reward.

You have something deeper to move towards. Something that cannot necessarily be bought, swiped, liked, achieved or consumed. Something that might require patience. Commitment. Faith. Vulnerability. The willingness to stay when novelty disappears. The courage to care deeply even though caring deeply means there is something to lose.

And maybe that is exactly what we are protecting ourselves from. Because a life lived from the heart and soul is not necessarily the safest one. It asks you to care. To attach. To believe. To take risks. To want something enough that losing it could hurt.

And the alternative is not freedom from pain. The alternative is a life so carefully protected from disappointment that nothing is ever allowed to matter enough to break your heart or fill it fully.

And I don’t know if that is the kind of safety I want. I wonder if, somewhere in our obsession with healing, protecting ourselves, regulating ourselves, becoming independent, setting boundaries, achieving goals and being “realistic,” we have forgotten to leave some room for wonder and magic… For ridiculous hope. For hopeless romanticism. For imagining a hundred ways things could go right instead of constantly rehearsing all the ways they could go wrong.

Perhaps losing the ability to dream is one of the saddest consequences of becoming too afraid of disappointment.

And maybe the opposite of our constant search for dopamine isn’t simply more discipline, fewer pleasures or another self-improvement routine. Maybe it is having something meaningful enough to dream about. Something that speaks to your heart rather than merely stimulating your senses. Something that reminds you that being alive was never supposed to be only about collecting experiences, accomplishments, possessions, attention and transient moments of pleasure.

It was also about meaning.

Connection.

Love.

Creation.

Contribution.

Wonder.

And the possibility of becoming someone you cannot fully imagine yet.

So this blog isn’t really calling you to learn how to dream. It is calling you to remember.

To remember who you were before someone told you who you should be. Before someone told you what was possible for you. Before experience taught you to protect yourself from the very things you wanted most. Before you became so good at being realistic that you forgot how extraordinary it once felt to believe. Before you started putting conditions on your own imagination and dreams.

Maybe today, instead of asking yourself what is realistic, ask yourself something completely different:

If there were no conditions, no fear, no limitations and no need to know how.. what would you allow yourself to dream about?

And then, just for a little while… don’t correct that answer.

Empathetically Yours,
Daris Kozhukhar