Welcome back to the Dream Toolbox. Let’s talk some more about belief systems because they control everything else that is in the Dream Toolbox. Belief in yourself and believing in your dream is a strange thing. With it, there is almost nothing you cannot achieve; without it, nothing will happen.

Creating that belief--and making it so much a part of your brain that nothing can ever shake it loose--is a lot harder. The mind wants to say, “I must be crazy to think I could do that.”

But you can do it and there is a way to make your dream so much a part of who you are that your subconscious mind will find ways to fulfill the dream even when you can’t see how it is possible.

One of the most powerful tools to make dreams real in your mind is a process I call Active Dreaming. Others call it Visualization, and it has been known for many, many years under these and other names. What I can tell you from first hand experience is that it works. Here is what to do:

Decide what your dream is. You can have more than one, but it is better to pick one big dream and focus on that until it becomes a reality. It needs to be something that you really want to happen, not just a “that would be nice to have” kind of dream.

Once you have the dream defined, fill in all the details in your mind. My original dream wasn’t particularly noble—I just wanted to have a million dollars in my bank account—but I then imagined every detail of what that would feel like, what kind of house I would live in, what kind of car I would drive, what the smell of the leather in that car would be, what it would be like to take the woman I loved to dinner and never worry if I could pay the bill.

In my own case, I created a whole life story for my dream and every morning for 10 minutes I would close my eyes and live that dream in my mind. I didn’t allow myself to think about how I would achieve it. I imagined it as already being real, right then, not in the future. That is the beauty of the mind; it can create future things and make them real today. We’ve all had that experience in the dreams we have at night. Sometimes we wake up and think they actually happened. That is the kind of clarity you want to achieve in your mind.

After doing that Active Dreaming exercise every day, use all the other tools in your mental toolbox to pursue that dream in your daily life. Dreams still require daily work, but what you will have done with Active Dreaming is to program your subconscious mind to see opportunities that you might otherwise never see, each one of which gets you closer to your goal.

Stay tuned for more tools from the Dream Toolbox.