Have any of your childhood dreams come true? Or are you still waiting for any of them? Were any of them realistic?
I never became a big league ball players, nor astounded delegates at a conference of astronomers, nor parked my expensive car in my circular drive. But what I never even dared to dream has come true.
I started collecting stamps when I was about 11, when stamps were small and plain and monochrome and engraved. I never dared to dream that I would ever see Latakia or Trengganu or Rio de Oro or Bechuanaland or Paraguay or Togoland or Sikkim. But I did. I made it happen. I’ve visited those places, and many more.
Which of your childhood dreams have come true – or still might?
I was plugged into my transistor AM radio back in the 1960s and 1970s. I wanted to be a DJ–and I did did become an FM radio host back in the 1980s. I worked my way up from graveyard to afternoon drive.
I left radio in the mid-1980s, but I never stopped enjoying using my voice. I have since done voiceovers, live announcing of events, and audiobooks, among other things. It’s not my main line of work, and it doesn’t pay very well, but I do it because I love it. And it all started with my childhood dream of hosting a radio show.
I’m currently in Sweden, last week in the UK, and we can safely assume that except for a cousin’s German daughter, all my relatives are over 2000km away.
There are some times it’s a case of “be careful what you ask for”, but I sure can’t complain I didn’t get it.
My first real career-dream I wanted to be an inventor who created amazing new things at the company I owned, and in adulthood I owned a start-up that developed and commercialized new technology products.
Technically, I think as a kid I was planning on inventing toys, and the company I owned was supposed to be as big and glamorous as the fictional companies in Batman or Ironman. Neither of those elements came to be but I think child Fuzzy Dunlop would have been thoroughly proud anyway.
I’m doing a glorified “subscribe to the thread” thingie here because I just now had the idea to try something again at SDMB that I/we never finished back in the 1960’s and I think now may be the time to give it another whirl. I was even about to start a new thread on the topic itself.
Rather than go full-throttle with a new thread at this stage, I thought I’d just test the idea here to see if anybody else likes the idea of such a project at SDMB.
If so, then maybe a “childhood” (I was in my 20’s at the time) dream might eventually come true.
Funny, when I was a kid, I just took life as it came and never thought about what I would do when I grew up. I thought I would likely go to college and did. I said I wanted to be a doctor, but that was to please my mother and I never really wanted it. The idea of becoming a mathematician? It never crossed my mind and I don’t know what I would have made of it if I had.
On the other side, when I was in HS, one of the teachers told me that they had once had a student who had announced when he was still in HS that he would become a professor of mathematics in Oxford–and did. I met him once and I am still kicking myself for not asking if the story was true. I met him in 1967 and he died a few years after that.
When I was still a kid at school, maybe 14 or 15, our English teacher decided to kill some time by going around the room and asking what our career/life dreams were. A lot of wife and mother stuff (all girls’ school), some good stuff about being lawyers or doctors.
I said I wanted to live in England, be attached to a university, and spend my time writing and doing research & field work on cool subjects, and avoiding people.
She got cross with me and told me to ‘grow up.’
So I did, and I do.
PS – as others have said, going to bed when you want, and cake for breakfast! The last time I was out and about on my own In Paris I had an enormous blanche dame and nothing else for lunch. It was awesome.
PS PS Also – my dad was incredibly stingy with the family when I was growing up – money was no object when he wanted to indulge himself, but screw everyone else to the point of us scrimping to get by while he blew his money on all sorts of ridiculous things – and constantly judge other people if they bought fun things for themselves as money-wasters. Being a grown up means I’m financially independent and don’t have to justify any of my purchases or travel to anyone.
I always wanted to be a fighter pilot and astronaut, so no, that never came to pass. I realized when I was 17 or 18 that my vision was likely not going to be good enough at that point to be a fighter pilot, and realized that the competition to be an astronaut was insane and that I was better off doing something else that wasn’t so all-or-nothing.
Beyond that, a childhood dream was to be on my own and not have to deal with my parents. I achieved that, and now sometimes wish that someone else would take care of stuff and I could just go play with my boys.
Sorry for the double post – I wanted to be a teacher from the time I was about six (because I liked writing on the chalkboard and thought, hey, teachers get to do that all day long! :3
When I was about 10 or so, I saw some show and this dude was on there who had a PhD in history, which interested me more than the subject of the show. I thought, wow, that’s what I want to do, and I’ll get to play in museums and do cool research and stuff. I remember announcing one night over the evening meal that I was going to get a PhD in history, and my older brother and my dad laughing themselves sick.
I suppose it does sound funny coming from a clueless little kid, but those two mean old fuckers used to chide me constantly that I’d be lucky if I graduated high school.
Also, my first video game was Pong. Given that I was playing Rift & Borderlands 2 last night, I think my dream of “I hope these things are in color some day… and maybe violent…” would seem to have been satisfied.
I also learned me some martial arts, how to shoot a gun and fight with a sword.
I was bullied horribly in school. I used to dream of all kinds of horrible, disastrous things happening to the bullies.
At least one of them has committed suicide and another has gone bankrupt. I don’t know about the rest. In the meantime, I’m in a real good place in life - had two successful careers running side by side, got to retire from one to concentrate on the other, and I have the love of a good woman.
My biggest one began when I was 9 years old and my parents took me to Victoria, BC. (We were poor.) I stood in front of the Empress Hotel and thought “The day I can afford to stay at that hotel is the day I’ve succeeded in my life.”
Last year, 31 years later, I took my husband and two friends and we stayed 3 nights at the Empress. My friend and I ran the Victoria Full Marathon.
