Published: August 09, 2006 10:29 am            

Dream a little dream with me

Do you have dreams?

Not the giving a speech in your underwear, monsters chasing you through the cemetery, fueled by a late night taco binge dreams — real dreams. Dreams about things you might one day see, own, accomplish, taste. Dreams that represent a sort of mythical benchmark in your life.

That’s where dreams differ from goals. Goals are meant to be attainable, to motivate. Goals are things like “I want to run a marathon” or “I want to never buy pants with a 40-inch waist.”

Dreams also differ from fantasies. Fantasies are meant to be unattainable, to distract. Fantasies are things like “I’d like to live on the moon” or “I want to see the Cubs win the World Series.”

But dreams are in the middle. Dreams are a nice combination of the two, because they represent the attainable and the unattainable. They can motivate and distract simultaneously. They give us things to reach for. They are fantastic goals — the places we hope to reach and know we can with hard work and a good deal of the chips falling our way.

Hopefully you do have dreams, because they put you in that nice place between having your feet on the ground and reaching for the stars. If you lean to far to either side, it’s easy to get off balance.

I have dreams. We have dreams, my wife and I, because that’s a good thing for couples to do together. But it’s interesting for us to look back at the entire time we’ve known each other — about eight years now — and see how those dreams evolve.

Sometimes you have a dream and it unexpectedly comes true. Before we got married, Kristie and I used to talk about life plans — graduating from college, getting married, getting jobs, having kids. We knew we wanted to own a house but made it part of the five-year plan. It remained a dream, even as we trolled open houses just for something to do on lazy Saturdays.

However, a mixture of an unpleasant rental situation, favorable interest rates and just enough saved up put us in our very first home less than a year after we were married. That enabled us to advance plans for families, careers and so on. We worked hard and the chips fell, and I can’t believe how stable our lives have become.

Sometimes you have a dream and you realize it isn’t anything you’d ever really want. When I was younger, I used to dream of being a sportswriter in Chicago covering the Cubs for the Tribune. Yes, I dreamed of being a Cub myself, but I learned around age 9 the difference between dreams and fantasy, right about the time Mike Osmund hit what seemed like a 900-foot home run off of me into the bullpen of the next field.

But the older I got — as my athletic talent diminished and my writing skills developed — I could see sportswriting as a real possibility. I also saw that sportswriters have much the same schedule as baseball players, only with far fewer zeroes on the paycheck. At the big league level, that means about six weeks of spring training, 162 hard working days a year (at least 81 on the road) and, if them team you’re covering makes it to the playoffs, balancing postseason excitement with a strong desire to just go home.

And hey — I turn to baseball for a release, for relaxation (which, as a Cubs fan, explains why I’ve been so high-strung since April). I didn’t want to run the risk of combing fun and work to the point where the lines were so blurred I could have disliked both, especially if it also meant not having a stable family life.

But I do have that stable life. Never have I been so thankful for what might appear to others as the epitome of boring. But I understand the perception. People see me go to work, go to church, go to the grocery store and go home, then take walks with a 2-year-old who insists I push an empty stroller and demands to watch the “Finding Nemo” DVD upwards of 37 times a day (I think Jack dreams of being a marine biologist).

What the outsiders don’t see, though, is the dreams. They don’t see me sailing on my imaginary houseboat or playing my imaginary pinball machine in my imaginary basement with carpet and well-behaved cats.

I still have fantasies, of course. After all, I am younger than Greg Maddux and older than Carlos Zambrano, so perhaps I still can develop a wicked breaking ball or pinpoint control and wind up pitching at Clark and Addison.

There’s no harm in a few fantasies, nor is there on working hard at the mundane goals that become the building blocks of a productive life.

But the middle —the dreams — that’s where lives are changed, and that’s where my favorite moments are spent. I’d imagine that’s the case for a whole lot of people.

So what about you? What are your dreams?

Scott T. Holland’s column appears every Wednesday in the Clinton Herald. His e-mail address is scottholland@clintonherald.com.

        

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