6 Dreams You Should Never Give Up On

The Dream of the (Tiny Little) Thing You Were Meant to Do

Look, we all know what I was meant to do: sing jazz in a Paris club (except that I can't sing) or write a novel (except I tried that—it didn't work) or become a large-animal country vet (except I'm too old to go to vet school, and also word on the street has it that it's harder to get into vet school than medical school). At times, the big yucky struggle of our life direction and purpose (which, by the way, is the most important struggle in our lives) is just too big and yucky to contemplate.

Take a day off. Figure out the tiny little thing you were meant to do. My friend Rachel was meant to dance in nightclubs. At age 42, she goes out once a week and shakes it until 3 a.m. in Minneapolis. My friend Marie was meant to look at paintings and just walk around admiring them on her Saturdays off. My mother was meant to take hot baths with scented candles. (Not just everybody can do this either; I find hot baths scalding, confining and panic-inducing.) Find your one tiny little thing and make it a big part of your existence.

The Dream of Having a Child in Your Life

Nobody wants to talk about this. It's too sensitive. It's too personal. It's too painful. But just about everybody has some version of these thoughts: You couldn't have a child, or you could, but you didn't find the right partner to have a child with. Or you had a child but wanted more and couldn't afford them. Or you had a child but wanted more but got divorced. Or you had a child, but something awful and life-rending happened (see Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs). Or—and in my humble opinion, this is the most heartbreaking—you didn't think that with your problems or your history or your hang-ups, you had much to offer a child.

Of course, there are exceptions to what I'm about to say, but for the 98 percent of us who are not violent or creepy or legally insane (yes, I made up this statistic), you have something that a child not only will find instructive or beguiling but also needs. It will be the neighbor's kid or your granddaughter or your niece or the sullen teenager who works at the corner store who you befriend after catching him stealing whipped cream canisters for use in mind-altering activities, and you'll say: "Hey, I used to do stuff like that too. And by the way, it never produced any kind of long-lasting happiness. Whereas bike riding or building geeky but awesome rockets with you in the park..."

The Dream of Feeling Good in the Morning

For most of us, getting out of bed each morning after age 37 is physically uncomfortable—not in a massive, disease-riddled or car accident kind of way. We're just overweight and out of breath. We're relatively thin but with throbbing joint pain. We get soul-crushing headaches due to stress or break out in hives due to some as-yet-undiagnosed allergy. Furthermore, none of us are doing much about it. We've been to see doctors, herbalists, acupuncturists and weird cultish healers that scared the heck out of us. Note to us (me included, due to my back problems and bad diet): You're not done until you feel good. Get back in the game. Quit, find and solve whatever so relentlessly ails you.

The Dream of the Amazing, Life-Changing Trip You Don't Have Time For

Studying the northern lights of Norway or floating down the Mekong River to view the ancient ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia: Let's face it, these are trips that require three totally scot-free weeks, not to mention the four full days in flights, buses and trains. These are also trips that, perhaps, sitting in your kitchen or cubicle, you've built up in your mind as the one badass, awe-inspiring journey that will finally make you into the badass, awe-inspiring person you dreamed of being at age 19. It's hard to admit, but you are who you are, regardless of whether you've been to a surf camp in Morocco. And, honestly, who you are is somebody who needs at least one week of hard-earned vacation spent not at home trying to save money so that one day you can go where you've always wanted to go, but rather in some doable version of the dream trip, which may, in fact, be a fantasy designed expressly to keep yourself from ever being able to realize it. Shorten the length of your stay or replace the destination with a similar but more achievable goal that exacts no jet leg (say, Buenos Aires with Paris) and just go! The thing to realize is this: It's not any one particular geographic place that's haunting you; it's the idea of not being stuck in any one particular geography.

The Dream of the Hero

Some of us dream of saving an old lady in an upstairs window from a raging fire. I, on the other hand, have watched too many Angelina Jolie movies. I have deep, developed fantasies about a rogue band of terrorists storming into my book club meeting, at which point I transform into a sexy, karate-chopping warrior, complete with machine guns and machetes, and kick the butts of all the evil masked offenders, only to take off running into the night at high speed to preserve my secret double identity, which no one in my book club ever suspected.

This is not going to happen. But I have been the warrior of lasagna for my friend with leukemia, who couldn't stand up to cook. I have been the ninja of at least two weddings where the bride succumbed to a panic attack and fainted in the bathroom. And I have been the superhero of Tuesday afternoon swimming lessons, which my son so badly wanted to take, but which also coincided with the end of the school day, requiring me to drive across town in under seven minutes, find an illegal parking place (since no legal ones exist), gamble on how long it would take the meter maid to find us and tow us, and then dress my son on the sidewalk as we sprinted to the pool, ripping off his T-shirt, slapping on the floaty backpack, only to bust through the doors and sit him down on the bench by the shallow end, saying to him with all gravitas, "Nobody can stop us, son. Nobody."

You too have pulled off the heroic and inhumanly possible on the way to the convenience store—and you will again and again and again. Most dreams are also part reality (otherwise we wouldn't believe them), and reality happens to be a condition that gives you plenty of chances through your life to rise to—no, soar through—the occasion.

The Dream of the Airplane That Actually Flies

When my son was 4 years old, he used to build elaborate paper constructions in the afternoons after preschool. Sometimes these were airplanes or rockets made out of water bottles covered in tinfoil, with invisible explosive flames.

One day he built a car out of an actual matchbox, along with looping paper roads that, at certain intervals, were supported by the cardboard rolls that come inside paper towels. That day, he handed me a shoebox. I knew what it was, and the dread immediately sunk in. "Put in the batteries," he insisted. "Get the electricity and the coal and help me make it work." I stood there, so painfully aware of what he wanted, for me to know how to build stuff that functioned and for me to be able to teach him how to build this stuff that functions.

All his life, people were going to dodge this by telling him to ask for the Hot Wheels loop-the-loop set for Christmas or just enjoy pretending the noise and sound and motion of an imaginary remote-control car and track. All that is fine, of course. We're not all engineers or Da Vincis. But there was a time in your life when you wanted to do something: fly a plane or catch a butterfly or draw a human hand that looks like a hand and not some weird, fingered crab. This skill is actually possible. Excavate the longing you used to have, practice and master it—even if that skill is simply lying on your bed the way you used to and dreaming of things the way you used to.

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