I have this recurring fantasy whenever I’m feeling down, imagining myself doing the most menial tasks. Instead of dreaming about what I want, everything I think life could look like, I wallow in self-pity. And I do this by looking at other people, imagining their lives are terrible. I look at the garbage man and I think maybe I should just start doing that for a living. Of course, that makes me an asshole—the garbage man is just living his life, doing his best, and I really appreciate the garbage man.

Maybe this is some deranged way of staying comfortable with what I already have, convincing myself I don’t deserve anything more. I think this is how people stay in bad relationships, bad jobs, bad situations altogether. Wrap your current life in the prospects of a worse life and suddenly things start looking pretty good. And then that dream life stays up in the clouds, untarnished by the realities of actual life. I guess that’s one way to happiness.

But I think I’ve got it all backwards.

Instead of punching down on a life I see as worse off (sorry, garbage man), I should take aim at those dreams in the sky.

It’s time to kill my dreams.

I don’t mean kill them off as if they never existed. I mean killing them from the dreamworld, in order to make them real. Because a dream out there in fantasy land is nothing but an idea, like this fortune cookie says . . .

I always dreamed of writing a novel. Then one day I stared down the blank page and started writing. Three years later, after too many late nights to count and hundreds of pages thrown out, the dream is dead because I killed it. Now it’s no longer some dream but reality. And I know what it feels like to write a novel.

Killing our dreams takes work. I’ve been watching this survival show with my kids called Alone. These people survive up in the Arctic, living off the land, and in one episode a guy kills a bull moose. It’s standing there in the meadow, majestic, wild and beautiful, before he shoots it with an arrow, cuts it up and smokes the meat, which gets him through a long hard winter. This is what our dreams do, if we let them. If we successfully hunt our dreams, they will sustain us.

Of course, killing our dreams means having to do something with them. The messy act of gutting them, quartering them, processing them into sustenance. But if our dreams are to nourish us, this is what it takes.

As for the life coach who killed mine . . . all I can say is thanks.

In his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig talks about Mark Twain’s experience becoming a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, how after he had mastered the knowledge to navigate the waters “all the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river,” Twain wrote. But at the same time, and just as important, something else was gained in the process, an intimate understanding of the river that carried its own entirely different kind of beauty. It’s not that understanding replaces beauty so much as it transforms it.

I’ve got no clue if going for my dreams will look as beautiful as the fantasies in my head. But there’s only one way to find out.

Bang bang.