Have any of your childhood dreams come true?

I’ve been into movies for as long as I can remember. I grew up on a farm and going into the “city” to see a movie was rare, though we did go to the Drive-In quite often. I was a walking, talking TV Guide and knew all the shows and what time they were on but especially what movies were on when. I’d read something about big stars or movie moguls having their own theaters and seeing all the latest movies in the comfort of their own home, and thought how amazingly wonderful it would be, to have a private movie library.

We now have a home theater with a ceiling-mounted projector, a 4’x7’ screen, surround sound and over 1500 DVDs. My childhood dream come true.

The funny thing is, we only watch things in there a few times a year because we go to the theater so often, to the point of seeing a few hundred movies a year in the theater. I never could have dreamed of that.

I found my soul mate too.

When I was a kid I was obsessed with San Francisco and London, never dreaming I’d get to visit either. I’ve been to San Francisco and to London twice, and will go a 3rd time in a few weeks. Living in flat Kansas, I had a thing for mountains, especially the Alps. On our way back from London we connect through Zurich and since it’s a daytime flight, I might actually get to see the real Alps! Ok, through an airplane window and only for a couple of minutes, maybe, but still…!

Edit to add, it’d be just my luck to be on the wrong side of the airplane.

I dreamed about not having to live in a tiny rural backwater southern town with one stoplight.

I don’t.

None.

I’ve gotten to visit all 50 states and all 10 provinces of Canada.

I have, in fact, owned a yellow Cadillac Fleetwood.

Which was a LITERAL childhood dream. As in, I was asleep and dreaming when I was 8 and I had a yellow car in it.

(NOTE: I had to get the Cadillac Fleetwood painted yellow. It was brown when I bought it. Used. Very used.)

I wanted horses,had several,but I had the ONE horse,Fury as a gelding…
And My German Shepherd Dog… Everything a GSD should be.
Horseless and dogless now

When I was young I had “givens” instead of expectations—I wrote, I sang, I created and “came up with” all the time.

As a beaten down teen I felt like I should go off and live by myself. I didn’t.
I’m getting closer now.

A couple weeks ago I met a soul mate, briefly, for an hour-long nano second. Enough to tell me there are more of us out there.

There’s still time for me to sputter before I go out.

I don’t know if I ever actually dreamed of this, but if as a kid I had realized it was possible, I certainly would have dreamed of it: I’ve gotten paid to play with Lego.

Well, OK, technically, I’ve gotten paid to help other kids play with Lego. But that’s close enough.

I always wanted Jeep or Land Rover and I had a LR for a while.
I always wanted to go to England and I have done so twice.
I wanted a horse and while I don’t own any at the moment, I have owned three.
I never did become a girl detective, like Nancy Drew, though.

Well, I always said I would live in New York City and here I am.

Getting paid (sometimes) to make maps which (sometimes) look as professional as the ones in the Hammond Atlas I obsessed over when I was eight.

At the risk of sounding like every other cheesy parent…having a kid and interacting with him in (often) delightful ways. Not exactly a childhood dream, but something I looked forward to and hoped for at least as early as my early teens.

In terms of technology, I recall at age 12 or so imagining a computer program (this was 1982) which would allow you to navigate from star to star throughout the Milky Way Galaxy (or perhaps beyond).

By 2005, this had come true – free Celestia software, and similar such things.

I almost can say that I dreamed about something like GoogleEarth, but I have to admit that isn’t quite the case. It’s more like something happening beyond my wildest dreams.

Finally, the discovery of exoplanets fulfills an assumption I had as a child (around 1980) that this would happen sooner or later. Happened a bit sooner than I’d expected it would.

Oh, one more thing – in the alternative planet I invented (also around 1980, age ten), the analogues to the “free world” and the “Soviet sphere” resolved their differences and united peacefully, after about 70 years of antagonism and sometimes hot wars. Took Earth another decade to get with the program.

(Less happily, the leader of the most prominent rock band on my invented planet died of a gunshot wound – at least a year before John Lennon did the same on Earth. The difference was, MY guy’s fatal wound was self-inflicted.)

I drew a regular comic strip in a newspaper for a year. That was one of my earliest childhood dreams. I also worked on a TV puppet show, I kind of wanted to do that for a while.

My other dreams of being a helicopter pilot, or working on a Star Wars film, did not come to fruition. Though a friend of mine did work on the Star Wars prequels, so I got to live it vicariously through him.