Dare To Dream

Since last year, I've been working with families with school-aged kids, and I've been struck by how quickly our society shuts down children's imagination.

Movies aren't real. The characters you invented are lies. The secret language you created with your siblings is confusing.

We forget that skyscrapers, subways, and smartphones all began as someone's "unrealistic" idea. We forget that human civilization and technological progress depend on a few people's fantasies before those fantasies become realities. Yet we shame kids and train them out of dreaming before they're even ten.

Killed Dreams, "Boring" Adults

It reminded me of my own childhood. I once wrote an essay about my dream life:

Waking up to birdsong.

Being friend with trees and grass.

Playing with friends by a river till sunset.

Living in a world that felt soft, free, and alive.

To me, it was beautiful. To the adults around me, it was dangerous.

My teacher tore the essay into pieces, and my mother was called into school. Together, they tried to talk me out of such nonsense.

"Other kids want to be scientists, doctors, governors," they said. "How are you going to make a living being friends with trees?" "It's unrealistic. You need to be practical," they said.

I couldn't put my instinct into words back then. I just lowered my head in shame.

Like many Asian children, I learned to trade imagination for safety, and trade my heart's yearning for the mind's logic. The dreamer in me was replaced by a version of myself designed to make others comfortable: Get the degree. Get the job. Get the salary. Play it safe.

And yet, something inside me never stopped aching.

What Ifs

Years later, on the shores of Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi, I watched a little girl sit on the nose of her father's longboard.

She asked, "Can we find a mermaid?"

The father smiled and said, "I've never seen one. But maybe you will. What would she look like?"

Her eyes lit up. She imagined different versions of a mermaid in vivid detail — wild, colorful, magical.

In that moment, my inner child felt seen. This father wasn't just entertaining a fantasy. He was sending a message I had never received:

"It's okay to dream."
"It's okay to believe in things that aren't there yet."
"It's okay to imagine something bigger than what others call 'realistic.'"

He didn't crush his daughter's wonder. And a part of me found healing just by watching that.

Tendering the Inner Child

I went through debilitating depression and anxiety, and years of healing work to see it clearly: the core energy of my childhood dream wasn't childish at all.

It was my soul's yearning, disguised in a child's language: a longing for freedom, joy, community, and harmony with Mother Earth.

That dream was never silly. It’s an important part who I am. It was sacred.

Now, as a psychotherapist, I see so many clients who were told, too, from a young age, to stop dreaming. They're adults now — living stable, "successful" lives on the outside — yet carrying chronic stress, anxiety, and a sense of disconnection and emptiness. They're yearning for more, but the moment they name that "more" — fix cars, travel the world, write poetry, develop indie games — their inner critic jumps out and shuts the dream down, fiercely. “How are you going to make a living by this?!” “You think you have talent and luck to make that work?“ “It’s impossible!“

Yes, the criticism from teachers and parents was bad back then; but the inner critic we built from it is even more vicious.

I like to ask those clients:

Whose version of reality are you living?
Did abandoning your dream actually give you more peace, freedom, or joy? Or did it just make you forget who you are?
What if your dream is just a direction — a yearning, a psychic symbol? What if it won't tear your life down?

It took me almost a decade to walk back toward my inner child who wrote the essay. I left a stable corporate career, went back to school, became a psychotherapist — not because the dream demanded something so specific, but because I finally let myself ask what the dream had actually been pointing at.

It wasn't "I want to talk to trees." It was a longing for a life that felt soft instead of armored. For some kind of harmony with something larger than a stack of money and a performance review.

From time to time, I still imagine traveling back in time to meet my inner child and inner teenager. I tell them what actually happened: that I took them seriously, eventually. That I write now. I paint. I sing. I dance. I walk in the redwood forest weekly. I have people who love me, and I care for them. That talking to people, closely and honestly from my heart space, is how I make my living.

My inner child never got the exact river, or the exact birdsong.

But her eyes sparked up whenever I tell her my life. She's comforted, because I never shut her wishes down; I took what was true underneath her dream seriously, and slowly, carefully, gave it a shape that could survive in the real world. I can see my inner child happy.