Today I was reminded of some things that often get mixed up with one another. Three concepts are related. These are dreams, purposes and goals. Dreams are visions of what might be. They are cousins to wishes.

They come upon a person in moments when the brain is slightly out of focus, as if in some way a person were seeing a distant land. They can be quite extravagant and impossible, and they can be rather simple and already half-realised.

Dreams let us know what is possible, but they require the very least from us in terms of effort. Dreams, furthermore, are sometimes like visions in that we are "given" a glimpse of what will or should be. When individuals dream big dreams, people often call that ambition, but when organisations dream big dreams, people call that leadership.

Purposes are not dreams.

Purposes are generalised statements of intent. They refer to the intentionality of people when people focus on those things that are of interest, value or need. Purposes are always about something. Purposes link people to actions; they are the desires, or the resolve that is required to accomplish goals. As such, without goals to tie them down, purposes tend to float and often remain elusive.

Goals are the specific culminations of dreams and purposes. Simply stated, a goal is something that someone wants to achieve. More specifically, goals are defined in terms of identifiable behaviours that occur in space and time. That is how one can evaluate whether or not he or she has achieved any particular goal.

Thus, if I dream of having sausage and eggs on Sunday morning, I make it my purpose to get prepared with all the ingredients I need to fix that meal.

Accordingly, I set specific goals to stop at the store on the way home on Friday, and to pick up the eggs, the sausage, the cheese, and so forth. If, on Friday evening, I realise that I have not stopped at the store and obtained those things, then I can know by Saturday morning that I have not met my goals, and I will likely not realise my purposes; thus, my dream will have turned into a nightmare.

Many people lose the relationship among these three elements of dreams, purposes and goals. Some spin up lists of things to do that make them seem organised but leave them feeling dissatisfied, because they are scattered and not very closely related to one's important purposes. Others lose themselves in reverie and wishes, daydreams about what might be, but because they never move along toward the action steps related to those dreams, their dreams turn into visions of what might have been rather than what still might be.

When dreams give birth to purposes, and then when resolve multiplies into goals, the things a person scratches off on their to-do lists result in fulfilment, accomplishment, and a sense of progress and competence.

When I was ten years old I realised that I wanted to be a writer. I didn't tell many people about that, because, well, it was weird for a ten-year-old boy in the central valley of California to want to be a writer.

What was a writer, anyway? I knew, but I didn't know anyone else who did. So, my dreams were about writing, and I read biographies of writers, and I kept all that to myself. My dreams turned into resolve, though, and over the subsequent years, I made goals that helped me create opportunities to write. After many years, one day I realised that I had become what I had purposed to be.

That leads to another facet of this subject. Some dreams, purposes and goals are about what we do but others are about what we are as people. For instance, I can dream of becoming a man of faith, like someone God would have written about in the Bible, were the Bible still being written, and I can even purpose to become such a man, but what kinds of goals, which are usually stated in terms of things I could do, might result in works of faith that might in time make me into a man of faith?

Here I think it is that we reach a place in which our dreams, purposes and goals must wait on something beyond ourselves, and whether you call that "the world" or "God", it requires a responsiveness to what is given to a person in a moment of life. Being grows through doing, but being is not the same thing as doing. As each moment of life comes to us from somewhere beyond, the question arises, "What kind of a person do I want to be?"

What I do depends on what I have dreamed about myself, what purposes I have resolved, and what practice in doing up to that point has built into me in terms of capacity to respond.

Dr. Philip Brownell, M.Div., Psy.D. is a psychologist at Benedict Associates. He can be contacted at 295-2070 or by e-mail at crossroadsg-gej.org