In my dreams, I quit jobs without backup plans, tell people exactly what I think of them, travel to places that terrify my waking self, and love without the protective armor of careful calculation. My sleeping mind is braver than my conscious one, more willing to risk, more eager to explore, less concerned with the consequences that paralyze my daytime decisions.
Last night I dreamed I was speaking at a conference about subjects I know nothing about, addressing an audience of thousands with the confidence of someone who had never heard of impostor syndrome. I argued passionately for positions I don’t actually hold, made jokes that would never occur to my anxious waking mind, commanded attention with an authority I’ve never possessed in daylight hours.
The sleeping self operates without the committee of fears that governs waking life—the voices that calculate risk, anticipate rejection, prepare for failure. In dreams, I am not afraid of looking foolish because there is no audience to judge foolishness. I am not afraid of failing because failure in dreams has no lasting consequences. I am not afraid of being myself because the self in dreams is unconstrained by the careful boundaries I’ve constructed through years of socialization.
Maybe this is why we’re sometimes reluctant to wake up from good dreams. The dreaming self gets to be the person the waking self is too scared to become—bold, honest, uninhibited, free to act on desires rather than analyzing them to death first.
The courage of dreams reveals the cowardice of waking life, shows us how much we’ve constrained ourselves through unnecessary fears, how many opportunities we’ve declined not because they were actually dangerous but because they required us to be braver than we believed ourselves capable of being.
But here’s what haunts me: if I can be brave in dreams, the capacity for that bravery exists somewhere inside me. The courage isn’t invented by sleep—it’s revealed by the absence of conscious interference. The bold dreaming self isn’t a fantasy character but a suppressed aspect of who I actually am when fear isn’t running the show.
Maybe the real question isn’t why my dreams are braver than my waking life, but why my waking life is so much more cowardly than it needs to be.
