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my dream is to live in like a 1.5br/1.5ba house (preferably with some sort of solar/screened porch) in the middle of a wooded area with frequent rainfall - but still relatively close to like a decently sized city/town - and do so comfortably with some sort of third-shift/wfh job that isn't too demanding.

this is unobtainable in Amerikkka, may it die soon, for like at least three different reasons so one can only pray life is indeed shorter rather than longer.

My dreams require money, and I have none

Short answer: No, because people in in industrialized societies aren't taught how to dream properly.

Loooooong answer: Anybody here read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho? If you haven't, don't. It's bad. But it was hugely popular in the early aughts when The Secret was also kicking around and it has a similar vibe. A boy dreams of gold buried near the pyramids and a fortune-teller says it's real and he should go looking for it. He sets out and along the way meets people who have Given Up and settle for mediocrity, and he turns their lives around with The Power of Entrepreneurship because anything is possible when you are chasing your dream.

He meets the titular alchemist, who gives him some gold for his journey and reaches the pyramids at long last. But he finds no treasure and gets beaten up by thieves who also steal his alchemist gold. Defeated, he goes home and meets someone who listens to his story, scoffs, and says that dreams are stupid; he keeps dreaming of treasure buried in the protagonist's back yard, would you believe it? Our hero goes home and finds the treasure right where the man said it would be.

The explicit moral of the story is that you're never supposed to give up even when chasing your dream and that if you are sincere in your pursuit and dogged enough things will find a way and the universe will manifest a bounty for you.

The implicit moral is that we're all just being jerked sround for the amusement of the demiurge who rewards and punishes us arbitrarily.

The actual moral is that it's always someone else's dream. The protagonist's dream didn't come true, some random dude's did; he just stole it. And what was there? Wealth, big whoop. Yeah, it's actually a metaphor for whatever you desire most in the world, but, and let's be real with ourselves here, for the majority of Oprah's book club that desire is wealth.

The fact is that people are bad at predicting what will make them happy, both because things are always better in our imaginations and second because the hedonic treadmill is baked into our brains and always makes what we don't have feel superior to what we do. And capitalism swoops in and hijacks all that machinery so spectacularly well that the world's wealthiest countries are also it's most miserable (also some if its happiest, paradoxically, but I'd argue Nordic social democracies do well at meeting the basic material needs of their citizens, at least).

The way off the hedonic treadmill is to actively practice gratitude, but that's predicated on having your basic material needs met (no one should be made to. Feel grateful for an empty stomach).

I feel like this is mostly preaching to the choir because folks here are empathetic and understand that, however appealing, the lifestyles of the wealthy are wasteful and unsustainable, but I think it's worth pointing out that dreaming in the developed world is so ruthlessly constrained by society and culture that it's no longer useful, if ever it was.

Can't do shit without money

i want to travel, I have no money. also autism. and Im lazy.

I live my dreams within my means

Until the world is safe and fair enough for everyone to have the opportunity to even have dreams for the future, let alone live them, it feels wrong to me to put much more than subsistence-level effort into my own frivolous bullshit. Gotta have a little fun and fulfillment to keep going, sure, but making my own personal wishes a main goal just doesn't feel right.

I guess maybe the world being safe and fair for everyone actually is my dream, but it's not an achievable personal goal.

Edit - upon reflection, this feels like a Debbie-Downer kinda comment that didn't engage with the heart of the question, and that's not who I want to be. I'm sorry, OP.

My actual dream life would be living with my polycule and assorted friends and family in agricultural bliss. Ideally, I'd live in one of many houses on a large rural lot, with people who similarly treasure a balance between privacy and community as we cherish and care for each other, our plants and animals, and the land.

I'm on my way to a certain extent - I have a house on a couple acres, there's certainly room here for more people - but I've put the social stuff on the back burner since we fell out with our friend group over COVID and other lifestyle and ethical differences. I've had trouble figuring out where I fit in with the local organizing scene, largely due to social/relational issues stemming from undiagnosed neurodivergence. I'm hopeful that medication and therapy will help me do better.

Sorry again, OP. Really don't want to piss in your Cheerios.

Wage labor is the big one

Money

My aspirations 15+ years ago were boring. My REM dreams are all nonsensical and always have been.

Much of my life today is wilder than I could have guessed, although ADHD and some childhood baggage still holds me back sometimes.

I don't want to be alive

My dream is to not have to work but still have the comforts of food and shelter and clothes that come from working.

The approved ways to achieve that goal are unobtainable for me and I already make more than my parents ever did

i have developed a crippling addiction to corn syrup and paying rent, I don't have time for "dreams"

if I want things, I want to not have the avoidant personality thing. I want real life friends that feel like friends, not like people I keep around by pretending. And I want a social environment that gives me the external motivation to accomplish things despite having adhd. Even with meds it's a struggle, without meds I'm cooked. Also, since we're dreaming, I want to work both in the arts and sciences, and in the sciences at a level where I get to actual do the science and not just be support. I'm fucking good at music, just also really shy about it. And I'm okay at writing, except I kinda worry I have no voice as a writer because I have no sense of self, probably where the avoidant shit comes from lol. And I struggle to find anything I can write for more than a few pages before I get burned out and hate it. I'll probably delete this because, like most things I say or do, I find it embarrassing lol.

It's hard

My dreams involve , and the reason I can't live them is because we're not yet sufficiently organized.

My dreams have had the unfortunate consequence of turning the rest of the world into a cyberpunk dystopian hellscape, and every major decision I've made has only increased the suffering, rather than decrease it, or at best, prolong or delay further suffering.

At some point you begin wondering if you're the antagonist/"bad guy" fighting against entropy.

So uh yeah. People can have bad dreams, because they don't know the cost and consequences thereof.

Luxury gay space communism built using exploitative labor practices. Even if you succeed, everyone still hates you.

my dream is to know what i'm good at and to know what would make me happy. i thought i wanted to be an artist, but i realized i hate doing art. i like imagining but i hate the phyiscal task of moving a pencil or stylus on a surface trying to imperfectly capture some curve or line or shape in an imagined image its just not fun, even when i am successful i feel relieved that i can do something else more than exhilarated or satisfied. i thought i wanted to be an athlete since i was like 18, i became obsessed with parkour, but i realized i would never compete with people that started when they were 7, while i was playing videogames, watching cartoons, and drinking far too much soda. doing physical activity never felt as good as people say, i don't understand how people can exercise while wearing clothes, its like intentionally sleeping with a wet blanket. don't even get me started on underwear. and every time i've tried getting into running (even just like 10 minutes a day) i hurt my ankles, somehow they always get painful and sore in the ankle or tendons or something for like several weeks. i didn't have insurance until recently to even go to a doctor for it. now its almost all i can do to do 10 burpees (squat/pushup combo) a day. before that i wanted to join the army like my dad, but then i learned a modicum of real history and couldn't go through with it (or is that just what i tell myself because i know i wouldn't have succeeded? i'm probably autistic, suck at physical activities, and havent even been able to keep a basic job. maybe in a different kind of country i could have done it). i'm basically a repressed adrenaline junkie thats not competent enough to satisfy those urges, pretending to be a normal failperson. i feel like i'm trapped in the wrong kind of person and world to be who i want to be.

I fucked up my finances in my 20s and now have a handful of mental problems that impact my motivation, focus, and enjoyment of things.

Its hard to get ahead.

My dream is the fall of the American empire. I'm working on it

Don't have money. Money requires going to school and then spending 40+ hours a week doing something I only tangentially enjoy doing and by then I'm tired.

Maybe when I'm retired I can finally start my life, if I could ever afford to retire.

Because I said mean things about a brocialist loser on twitter

Similar to what others have stated, paying rent and on top of some dental and medical shit that have fiscally fucked me hard. Still, I landed a low stress job and the past couple years I've legit had time for some of my hobbies. I still gotta penny pinch for new running shoes, though.

My dream mainly consists of actually living a fulfilling life. I want to be able to exist as a respected member of a community of people, with friends, family, a job that I don't hate & which doesn't demand that I sacrifice other parts of my life to it just to achieve basic subsistence, and an ability to develop myself within my pursuits & interests outside of work.

This is made unachievable for a variety of reasons, although at the high-level it's partly a consequence of Capitalistic social & economic structures, it's also in large part a consequence of my own individual social capacities (I have ASD/ADHD). That said, I don't really see my dream being achievable under the kind of society that people on this website would want, because despite their protestations to the contrary, they also actually just prefer the social atomism of modern neoliberal society, they would also just prefer a more robust welfare system to be a part of it. Or at least that's the impression I get from reading posts on here for the last 3 years.

Edit: For clarifications sake; I prefer the Soviet economic model, and I think I could get much closer to what I want with that than what anybody else is offering. I'm making the point though that I don't think that the people here could, or even really would implement that, and I don't think that my dreams are compatible with the social mores that everyone else here seems dead-set on.

I don't understand human relationships despite monumental effort put into doing just that, and as a result cannot network and have serious difficulties finding a new job, and can't make any money. I dropped out of college multiple times due to suicidal depression. I'm in constant pain and loneliness is eroding my will to live. Plus I had a bunch of expensive dental work done in my 20s due to personal neglect from said suicidal depression, and have only recently climbed out of other medical debts due to a relative dumping money in my lap to clean the slate.

So to maintain my agonizingly painful and stressful lifestyle I'm already at my limit and basically doing it alone despite the presence of people who say they love me but whose love I often seem incapable of feeling. This leaves me with little time and energy to write, which itself has barriers of procrastination and anxiety. Even if I did finish a book I'd still have to sell it, and I don't know how to do that.

I'm infused with this learned helplessness that pain and failure and alienation drilled into me, and I struggle to believe in myself with regards to doing literally anything, from cleaning up after myself to losing weight to doing schoolwork. So for something as monumentally important to my self-image as my writing and art, there's a lot of anxiety that gets in the way.

TLDR: I'm an absolute mess pscyhologically and I fear what my art will reveal about me to others (and myself)

Dreams are only nice if they remain a fantasy