Dreams and aspirations

Following Dreams and how to recognise when you actually catch one up.

I was looking at the illustration of a sailor searching the skies that I created a while back for Holy Mackerel Cards. It started me thinking about dreams and aspirations, and how it’s easy to think that they are like those pots of gold at the end of the rainbow, that you are never likely to reach.

But dreams, they do sometimes come true!

Occasionally, when a dream is achieved, it arrives in a blast of fanfares and external acclaim, but more often they happen while we have our minds on the next goal, or when other events in our lives are taking our attention.

A state of constant goal-setting and aspiration-chasing seems to be a part of the human condition, leaving the often long held achieved dream to quietly join the mundane ranks of the everyday. So how do we celebrate a dream achieved? How do we even realise we have reached it?

One example, in my case, was a dream I had to work in children’s books shortly after leaving art college. It took the shape of a big, all encompassing fact of a dream; of being an illustrator who worked in picture books and created them in a steady and unrelenting stream of projects - the perfect idealisation of being a picture book illustrator. In actual fact, the children’s book illustrating part of my working life (I have illustrated about five) has been strung out in time; happening here and there between the jobs I had to do for my then agent, and large and all encompassing life events. It is good for me to recognise that those books I have worked on are still a part of the dream achieved, even though they’ve not been in the long and unrelenting straight line of my post-art college fantasies!

I think the answer to whether you have achieved a dream is to look back at what your dream was and to maybe realise it might not have happened in the exact way you expected it to, but that it you still have. Real life happens in the rush of the everyday world, and you may have totally missed an achievement, or downgraded it to the mundane.

Have a look and check to see if you can find any you’ve missed!