Dream A Little Dream For Me
January 22, 2004

I've heard of a personal trainer, but this is too much.

I recently saw a book by a woman marketing herself as a "dream coach." I'm not talking about some mystic in a turban who tells you what it means when you dream of snakes singing arias from the Eiffel Tower. This is a self-proclaimed "professional" you can hire to coach you on how to "find your passion" and help you "dream bigger dreams" to make your life more successful. It's no longer enough just to get a life, now you have to hire somebody to tell you how to live it.

I view this as yet another symptom of our overly-fragmented and disconnected society. Once upon a time, people lived and worked communally, and everyone had a goal and a task to perform—hunters hunted, gatherers gathered, adults raised chilren. Artisans crafted and shamans invoked the gods. Goals were simple, and life made sense. Even in more recent eras when families and friends weren't so spread out, there were grandparents nearby to give advice, spouses and siblings to help bounce ideas around, friends and colleagues to offer support.

But these days we're all far too busy to go through the normal channels, to share our goals, dreams, and plans with people who actually care about us. Who has time to establish genuine relationships with soul-supporting friends when we can hire strangers to coach us through our lives? There are personal trainers to browbeat us into physical activity, career consultants to tell us what kind of job we should have and how to get it, and financial advisers to instruct us in how to spend or save our money. We can pay stylists to create the way we look, and personal shoppers to buy our clothes.

Now, on top of all these other specialists hammering away at who we are, we're expected to hire a coach to access our dreams for us and lift us out of our puny, underachieving little lives. Apparently, our dreams have become coy and coquettish, spurning our attempts to get to know them better, playing hard to get. Our dreams are screening their calls and won't pick up for just anyone. It takes a professional coach to access them.

The problem here is not the coaches, old-fashioned Yankee opportunists who have identified a potential market and figured out a way to profit from it. Nobody has to coach them on how to make a buck. But what about their clients? Are there really so many people out there willing to abdicate responsibility for their own decisions and hire someone else to do their thinking for them?

In a way, you can't blame them. Life is complicated, time is short, and we all have way too much going on. At home we're frazzled by our kids and families, our bills, mortages and the daily chaos of living. At work cell phones and email and a thousand minor crises demand our attention. News headlines badger us about how frightening, dangerous, and competitive the world has become, movies and TV taunt us with the glamour and luxury we're missing out on, and self-help books scream at us to improve our lives. We're so convinced we're incapable of making important decisions, we're only too glad to let someone else, some "professional" tell us what to do.

I'm not saying life should be one spontaneous free-fall from the cradle to the grave. Of course goals, dreams and aspirations are important, but you know what they say about wishin' and a-hopin'. Nobody can give you a single magic formula for making your life work, just as there's no specific blueprint for painting a masterpiece or writing a best-selling novel. Like anything else, it's trial and error, but unless you get out there and try, you won't make those errors you can learn from, or discover for yourself what works. You have to do the hard work yourself; that's how you access your dreams.

John Lennon once observed "Life is what happens when you're making other plans." However well-laid, it's never the plans that are important. It's living the life.

FIRST NIGHT FLASHBACK Many thanks to all of you who read my last column and came downtown to cheer us on at the Candle Mandala during First Night. An hour before the venue opened, when we couldn't get any of the apparatus we thought we'd perfected to work, Art Boy was ready to scrap the whole thing. But with some minute tweaking of the lines (I'll have to start calling him Engineer Boy), and last-minute bargaining with the Universe, we got it up and running moments before our first volunteers arrived. Thanks to all of you who shouted out encouragement, or merely oohed and ahhed as each candle floated down into the pit. (Okay, some of them still wiped out, but the wishes were not invalidated by mere technical difficulties.) So many of you participated we had to turn the circle mandala into a spiral to accommodate all the candles: from the footbridge above, it was a labyrinth of light. Thanks to all our intrepid volunteers. And thank you, Santa Cruz.