I am a dreamer, even when I try to hide it under practical language.

For a long time, I treated dreaming as something slightly embarrassing. A private weakness. A childish habit. Something you can do quietly, but should not take too seriously in adult life, especially if you want to sound mature.

Where I grew up, people said, “Dreaming does not hurt.” It sounded harmless, almost dismissive. As if dreams were something soft and useless, something that does not damage you only because it does not do much at all.

I do not believe that anymore.

The dreams I tried to dismiss did not disappear. They stayed in the background and waited for my life to catch up with them.

The dreams that stayed

For years, I wanted to live in Canada.

It did not look realistic. I worked in film and video, often as a freelancer, and the usual immigration paths did not fit my life very neatly. I did not have the kind of official work history that makes paperwork simple. I had experience, but not the clean version of experience that immigration systems like to read.

So I learned to say the dream more quietly.

Canada became something I wanted, but also something I did not want to be naive about. A country I imagined while also explaining to myself why it probably would not happen. Beautiful nature, English language, film industry, space, distance, a different kind of life. It was all there in my head, but I kept wrapping it in realism so I would not look foolish.

At some point, I told myself I had let it go.

I had not.

Then life moved in a way nobody would have chosen. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine changed everything. Canada opened a special program for Ukrainians. We were outside Ukraine at that moment. Suddenly, a dream that had looked impossible became part of reality through a door I could never have planned.

I am careful with this story. I do not want to turn tragedy into some neat spiritual proof. War is not a motivational device. Nobody’s displacement should become a pretty lesson about manifestation.

But I also cannot ignore what happened inside me when that door appeared. I recognized it immediately. Not because I had planned it perfectly. Not because I had earned it in some clean narrative way. Because the dream had been living in me long enough that when the possibility arrived, I knew what I was looking at.

If I had never wanted Canada, maybe that door would have looked like noise.

That is the part I keep thinking about.

Not whether the universe rewarded me. Not whether desire creates events. I am not interested in pretending I understand that.

What I know is simpler: some dreams stay with us for a reason, even when we try to become too reasonable to admit them.

Wounds can shrink desire

As children, many of us know how to want.

We want a bike, a camera, a place, a person, a life. Then disappointment starts teaching us to want less. Parents divorce. Friends disappear. First love hurts. Money becomes a warning. Adults tell us what is realistic, what is foolish, what people like us can expect.

Little by little, dreaming begins to feel unsafe.

It is easier to pretend you do not care. Easier to laugh at the dream before someone else does. Easier to say you are practical than to admit you still want something badly.

The safer move is to make your desire smaller than it really is.

That is what I did with Canada for a long time. I did not stop wanting it. I only learned to speak about it as if it were a nice idea, not a real wound in the shape of a place.

Maybe this is what happens to many dreams. They do not die. They become embarrassing.

Dreaming is not the opposite of work

I do not believe dreaming replaces action. I believe it reveals what action may eventually be for.

Maybe that is why pretending your dreams do not matter is so damaging. It does not make you stronger. It only cuts you off from one of the few forces that can pull you through fear.

I do not want to turn this into a slogan. I only know that when I stop dreaming, my life becomes smaller. More reasonable, maybe. More protected. Easier to explain. But smaller.

So I am trying to let myself want again without apologizing too much.

Dreaming does not hurt.

But pretending I do not care can hurt for years.