Impossible Dreams?

Do impossible dreams actually exist? I'd push back on the premise. Nearly everything we end up building or becoming began as a dream first, some picture in the mind of a thing we wished were real. Hypnosis is a good example of how slippery the line between possible and impossible really is. Under hypnosis a person's sense of what their body can tolerate shifts, and suddenly the impossible shows up as fact. People have undergone surgery with no anesthesia at all.

Then there are the dreams other people carry around. We're quick to look at someone else's vision and stamp it impossible. Suppose we flipped the order: accept the thing first, reserve judgment, and reject it only after we've actually turned the proposition over and looked at it. You could go even further and entertain a stranger idea, that if someone believes a thing is possible, their belief alone moves it toward being possible. Try it with world peace. How fast does your mind file that under never going to happen? And how differently might it go if enough people simply stopped filing it there? Researchers have run experiments where groups focused on an outcome, pictured it, prayed over it, and measurable things such as local crime rates dropped.

A lot of the time we hand control of our dreams to other people the moment we swallow the line that it can't be done. They are the ones labeling our dreams impossible. Think back to a day you walked out the door grinning about some plan of yours, and somebody talked you out of it, and the grin flipped over into a frown. People who feel powerless in their own lives often reach for power by steering someone else's, since steering their own is off the table. Picture all that enthusiasm, the kind that gets stamped out in those conversations, pointed instead at finishing the thing.

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