Last night I had a dream that monsters were attacking the city and I felt like someone had to do something. I summoned up the courage to leap into the air and suddenly I was flying.
The experience was exhilarating as I worked to avoid powerlines and building tops. Soon I was high in the sky and building speed until I got to the monsters in the heart of the city.
I dropped down and punched the stuffing out of all of them. My punches were making those monsters fly into buildings or splat on the spot.
Yeah, it was a pretty fun dream.
For those who think that having dreams like that would be cool, realize that my next dream was that I had just adopted a cute little child that turned out to be a demon. And when I say that, I don’t mean that she was a handful, I mean that she was literally a creature from Hell.
Having vivid imaginative dreams can be a double-edged sword.
I wondered if I could return the demon-child to the adoption agency, because I think raising a demon might be beyond my parenting skills. Then I woke up and realized that I didn’t have a demon child and I was relieved.
So, back to my flying dream. After I defeated the monsters I returned home and started telling my friends what happened. Actually, I started bragging to them, and of course they didn’t believe that I could fly.
To prove them wrong I stretched my hands over my head and tried to fly away, but this time it didn’t work. As hard as I tried it wouldn’t happen.
The difference between being able to fly in my dreams, and not being able to fly was my belief that I could do it.
Hello! That sounds like a lesson. My subconscious mind was telling me something.
I don’t think it’s any coincidence that before I went to sleep last night that I wrote in my journal how incredible the resources are that we have available to us today that we didn’t have 20 years ago.
Things like print-on-demand, digital art solutions, crowdfunding, and promotional opportunities via social media are all available to creative people today.
20 years ago, when me and a group of buddies at Rain King Studios created comics, we didn’t have those resources available to us. I wondered what we could have achieved with modern advances.
The thing is, we created and published those comics at a time when we were just as busy as we are today. And we did it at a time when we had far less access to money, or any experience doing much at all.
We just made it happen.
Sometimes doing something and not doing something is not about the ability, it’s about the will. It’s about believing in yourself and doing what you have to do to make it happen.
I have a list of big projects that I’d like to be doing right now, and yes, I’m busy with work, and building a name for myself in a number of fields, but I could carve out the time to do the big projects too.
The difference is the will to do it, and the belief to make it happen.
Are there some things in your life that you know you could be doing, that you should be doing, and you have the ability, but just haven’t done it?
Now’s the time. Let’s do it together.
Figure out whatever it is on your list that you’ve been putting off for all the wrong reasons, dust it off, and put in the real time that it’s going to take to make it happen.
My list is long but I’ve got a novel that’s been on my mind for a while and I’m going to make the leap on that right now.
Meanwhile, I’ve got monsters to fight in my dreams and the only way it’s going to happen is if I believe in myself.
Dirk Hooper
Dirk Hooper is a professional writer who has done work for many high-profile online magazines, has won the Top Writer Award at Quora for the past two years, and a Moore Award for copywriting in 2017.