My family recently watched The Wind Rises, an animated Japanese movie about the early days of airplane design. Many of the early attempts at flight didn’t work very well. There were so many failures, in fact, that the movie ends with an Italian airplane designer remarking that “Airplanes are beautiful, cursed dreams waiting for the sky to swallow them up.”

The next day my son William asked me if all dreams were like this – beautiful but cursed to fail. I told him no. We were downtown at the time and I pointed to the businesses around us – every one of them is the realization of someone’s dreams. In fact, everything humans have accomplished is the result of pursuing our dreams. And one need only look up at the jet contrails crisscrossing our sky to see that even the dreams of airplane designers can come true.

But I could see why William might wonder – it’s rarely easy to make our dreams come true. Dreams come in all shapes and sizes, and the dream of starting a business is one of the most widespread. A recently released poll conducted by UNL shows that self-employment is on the increase in Nebraska, especially in small towns. Yet according to IRS tax filings, only 1 in 5 new businesses is still going after five years. Starting a business is a lot more difficult than many people realize, and despite their best efforts, many fledgling entrepreneurs fail.

Failure is so common that I’ve heard it said it’s only after four or five failures that most entrepreneurs succeed. That’s because the lessons taught by failure are often more valuable than those taught by success. Having to fail first in order to succeed is daunting, but it shows how many business people keep going despite their setbacks. It takes a lot of character to start over four or five times. But that’s how powerful dreams can be – as the old song goes, a strong dream empowers you to “pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again.”

Dreams are so fundamental to being human that even our nights are filled with them. And while it isn’t customary to compare our conscious, deliberate dreams with our random nighttime dreams, both arise from deep within us. The difference is that our conscious dreams involve an active interplay with the world around us. The world around us is a difficult place, and we must struggle against it to make our dreams come true.

But our nighttime dreams don’t have this problem. At night the rules of the waking world don’t apply and as a result our dreams often transform nonsensically in place and circumstance. Yet these dreams aren’t just random images; strange as they often are, our sleeping dreams have a storyline, and though it can change without rhyme or reason, we are pursuing goals even as we slumber.

To be human is to dream; perhaps because in struggling to achieve our dreams we are transforming not only the world around us but ourselves as well. Pursuing our dreams teaches us many things, and though these lessons are often hard, hardships force us to grow.

Dreams can be so elusive as to sometimes seem cursed, but dreams are not a curse. In working to realize our dreams we are also working to realize what is best within ourselves. As long as we pick ourselves up after each failure, we have succeeded. For dreams, whether waking or sleeping, come from within, and their ultimate realization is the inner growth that pursuing them brings.