I wanted to be a nurse. Now I’m halfway through a nursing & midwifery degree. I guess it pays to have simple childhood dreams.
I wanted to be a librarian. Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor the money now to go back to school for my MLIS, which is necessary in order to become a librarian. By the time I retire from my current job, there might not even be libraries anymore. 
For those who haven’t seen this, it is just outstanding: Randy’s lecture. Take the time to watch this.
My childhood dream was to be successful and respected. I was bullied horribly as a kid and I grew up thinking that I was worthless. I’ve fought depression all my life; setbacks seem to be magnified and successes diminished.
It took an outside pair of eyes to show me that I have succeeded in achieving my dreams, and in two professions to boot. I am very successful in my “daytime” career as a database administrator; I have had other DBAs from other companies call me and ask me to help them with problems. That’s true peer recognition.
In my “evening” career, I am a martial artist. I was just promoted to 6th Degree Black Belt and accepted for training to become a Master Instructor. I change people’s lives, especially kids, for the better on a daily basis with what I teach them and how I lead by example.
Randy mentions brick walls several times in that lecture, and he is absolutely right. Never, ever give up.
I wanted to raise and train horses. I still do, but I am grown up enough to know that won’t be happening in this lifetime.
I wanted to be rich and marry David Cassidy.
From David Cassidy’s wikipedia page:
Caricci, you could either see this as an opportunity to live your dream, or a situation in which you dodged a bullet. 
When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a truck driver. When I was 11 years old, the movers had just finished unloading our family’s stuff in our new house, and they took me for a ride down the block in the cab of their big-rig; that was totally kick-ass and reaffirmed my young ambition.
Then when I got to high school, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. Dad was a navy pilot back around 1960 before he pursued a career as a civilian mechanical engineer, so I grew up being exposed to aviation from the perspective of a pilot and an engineer. I’m pretty sure I had the aptitude and physical health necessary for a career as a fighter pilot, but I chose an engineering career instead.
Now I’m 42. A career as a fighter pilot is out of reach, as I’m pretty sure I’m too old.
Truck driver? Well, I’ve got a stable job as an engineer that pays a lot better and doesn’t take me away from home very often, so I’m not interested in giving that up.
I’ll jump in and say, I never had one. I’ve tried to figure out why. We didn’t have TV so I didn’t have any visuals to go by, and while I read a lot, I didn’t see myself as potentially doing any of the things I read about. Our family wasn’t very social so I didn’t hear about all the things there were to be; my father worked a desk job he hated and mom stayed home with us. Plus there’s always fear. So I ended up muddling through and being satisfied with surviving.
I wanted to be an architect but I was mediocre in my technical drafting class and my dad, being an accomplished engineer, advised me that architects don’t make much of a living unless they are very gifted and computer programs were replacing the mediocre ones. Soul crushed, I became an assassin.
I wanted to be a member of the Olympic Dressage Team and win a gold medal. Unfortunately, practically anything with horses is very expensive and my parents could not fund such ambitions.
I’ve been studying dressage for five years now on my own nickel, shortly after I turned 50, and am happy to think that within a couple of years, I’ll be able to compete successfully at First Level (which a long waaaay below Olympic level).
I also had no childhood dream for the future and because of that, achieved far more than I dreamed and quite satisfied.
I read the book, and it is fantastic. Not in a glurgy ‘‘oh my god I’m dying’’ way. You don’t even really think about the fact that he’s dying as you read it, because he just had such a way of embracing life.
Also contains one of my favorite quotes:
Randy just got his Ph.D. in engineering(?) from Carnegie-Melon.
His mother says to a guest, ''Oh, I’d like you to meet my son. He’s a doctor. But not the kind who helps people."
To answer the question of why I chose not to realize my childhood dream of clinical psychology… by the time I was in a position to consider this, my husband was already in a grad school program for clinical psych. I saw what he was going through and said, ‘‘Hell to the no!’’ I’m happy with my MSW.
I grew up listening to old Bill Cosby comedy records. When I grew up, I wanted to make people laugh. You can’t tell from my posting here, but I’m pretty funny; I just never had the self-confidence to cultivate it.
The first career path I was on was to be a police officer. Then I realized that I’d probably hate it.
I wanted to be a superhero. I’ve been blocked from my dream by not having been born on Krypton, not having been bitten by a radioactive spider, etc. Reality is cruel. 
I also wanted to be a major-league baseball player. But by the time I was 12 or 13, the other kids were throwing pitches that I didn’t have a prayer of hitting. Nor could I throw like they did. So that dream died early, and it was pretty easy to let go of it, given how obviously outclassed I was even then.
I didn’t have a name for it but I wanted to collect a sample of pond water from every concievable small and large body of water on the globe and look at it under a microscope. I used to dig up soil from areas where ponds had dried up and submerge the soil under different levels of water to see what came to life. I was facinated that the small difference in water pressure could activate different life forms based on their life cycles. And then I discovered marijuana and sex and everything got put on hold.
I wanted to be an icthyologist.
I wanted to study sharks. Love 'em. Read about Eugenie Clark–wanted to be her. Unfortunately I don’t like to go in the ocean–THERE ARE SHARKS THERE. Even though I know the likehoods of shark attack are lower than lighting striking you, I’m a worrier.
Now I read almost every book about sharks I can, see them when I can. And I’m going back to school to get a degree in Biology, so maybe I can be the person in the lab, helping.
I wanted to be an oceanographer. Studied whales and sharks and thermoclines and currents. Everything I could think of.
I grew up in the south, inland. Sometime when I was 14~16 I went to the beach for the first time. The Atlantic tried very hard to kill me.
I do Systems Admin now. In SoCal but inland.
I wanted to be a doctor, specifically a pediatrician. I am a doctor but in emergency medicine not pediatrics. I also wanted to be an astronaut, a ballerina, a professional baseball player and president of the United States. I suppose it’s not too late to get in to politics but the others clearly aren’t going to happen at this point.
In the fifth grade, I remember telling the teacher I wanted to be an artist/astronaut/scientist.
I hit two out of three. But ask anyone that knows me, and they’ll tell you I’m a space cadet. 
So I’m living the dream!
But to be honest, I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I was a kid. I quickly learned that no one respects “I don’t know” when they ask you about career goals, so I came up with something. And since then, I’ve just kind of landed wherever I am.
I wanted to be a veterinarian…and a writer. Unfortunately, Biology, Chemistry and math classes over Algebra II - I just couldn’t face them in college. So instead, I got a job as a kennel girl twenty years ago and now I manage the human resources for a group of three veterinary hospitals. As for writing, I won NanoWriMo three out of the last four years and have written an article (about pet insurance) published in a very small hobby magazine. I am the go-to person for any business correspondence at work and I get compliments on the fact that I can spell and string sentences together better than most. Recently, I wrote a pretty damn good letter that got one of my vets off of jury service - notoriously harder in my state than it used to be :D.
Not exactly dream fulfillment but occasionally I have gotten to practice veterinary medicine (including minor surgery and once, put a displaced shoulder back in successfully) on my own sheep ;)). I haven’t killed anything yet.
Now my dream is to own a bed and breakfast with its own English pub that overlooks my forty acres of green grass and bouncy lambs. I’m working very hard on perfecting my breakfast potatoes, just in case…