Dreaming, Week 5: Your Dream Life Starts Here by Kristina Karlsson
Your Dream Life Starts Here by Kristina Karlsson is equal parts guide and journal, with beautiful photos and a lovely, magazine-esque layout. The eye-catching presentation shouldn’t be surprising, as the author is the founder of kikki.K, the international Swedish designed stationery and paper goods company. Karlsson made the decision to chase her dreams with reckless abandon, developing a process for annually identifying her core values and desires and creating an actionable plan that will lead to her goals. Including bits and pieces of Karlsson’s own story, this book is less a memoir and mainly focused on stirring up the reader’s own dreams. Each chapter features an inspiring story about dream chasers around the world, including those of Michelle Obama, Sir Richard Branson, and Dr Tererai Trent.
Karlsson leads readers through chapter after chapter of writing exercises to guide you to the life of your dreams. These exercises are time consuming, but definitely worth doing if you really want to get to the heart of your desires and create a plan for carrying them out. If you’re prepared for some mental work, you will find these exercises very helpful—-if you’re not, you may find them painstaking and tedious. Karlsson recommends that you take this book at a pace of a chapter per week; for the sake of my blog, I read the book and completed all of the exercises over a span of one week, which was entirely too rushed. It would be better to take Karlsson’s advice and take it slowly in order to really get the full effect of all the goodness this book has to offer.
101 Dreams, 101 People
In one of the first exercises in the book, readers are instructed to list 101 dreams for their lives, any dreams, large or small. Later on, Karlsson writes about the importance of identifying people you have been inspired by and wish to meet. This could be a person in your neighborhood, in your industry, or a person you’ve only read about. Karlsson wasn’t shy about her desire to meet successful people like Stella McCartney and Arianna Huffington.
Karlsson writes, “So much of our experience in life comes from the people we meet and the people we surround ourselves with. People are an amazing source of inspiration and hearing about their dreams is one of the powerful ways of inspiring you to pursue your dream life too…Your list could be made up of people you know and admire, or people a bit more remote, like a famous entrepreneur or an author who inspires you.”
Who would make your list? I didn’t get anywhere near listing 101 dreams or 101 people I’d like to meet— I think I only listed something like fifty dreams and fewer than ten people. But the practice of pushing myself to imagine that many dreams and that many dream encounters has stirred up audacious dreaming in me.
A Dream Week, A Dream Year
Two exercises in Your Dream Life Starts Here involve fleshing out what your dream week and your dream year would look like. In all of the exercises I’ve done on dreaming and goal-setting over these last few weeks, these have been the most impactful and stirred the most creativity in me. Oftentimes when I imagine what a day in my dream life may look like, it’s hard to imagine the ways that my life may look differently on different days. I can’t imagine that my dream life would consist entirely of Saturdays or only of a perfect crisp autumn day- so imagining just one dream day feels sort of silly.
This exercise forced me to think about what a dream week would look like, with work days and days off, days with friends and days devoted to creative work. Imagining a dream year made room for imagining what Christmas holidays may look like, summers with my children, and how I want to celebrate my wedding anniversary. These exercises were inspiring and exciting, and really helped me to imagine what it is that I want the future to hold, not just on a weekend or on a vacation. The entire picture of what I believe God has for me slowly begins to form to reveal a fully fleshed out story of family, joy, and creativity.
Thank you for reading about my fifth book selection for my series on Dreaming. This is the last book in this particular series. Next week, I’ll begin my series on Rhythms. To stay up to date on everything new on the blog, join my email newsletter below.
Photos by Kara Buse.
