The Gentle Tyranny

the irony of the dream killer

I am sharing this from both positions, having been a dream killer at points of my life in the guise of safety, and the dreamer who has experienced this irony on rinse and repeat.

I take risks, BIG ones, and as a result I have experienced great loss and great gains. My life has been both a model of what not to do and a model for “success” to many. None of that matters. What matters (if anything) is that I follow my inner guidance system, it wasn’t as on point in my early years, there was a learning curve. However, it is now like a well honed missile and when it comes online I listen and more often than not, act.

I find myself wanting to support and clear the way for others dreams far more often than I don’t. When I get a feeling of fear, dread, or sadness when someone shares a dream with me I know immediately that is about me, not them. In the past with my children I tried to control environments etc. believing I was protecting them, when the truth is it was me I was trying to protect. This doesn’t mean I didn’t have some valuable insight that I could offer, but only after working through my own emotions could I offer that in a way of genuine support. I am learning to be able to self sooth so I can also share my fears from a place of clear intention about intended and unintended consequences. It takes practice in my most intimate relationships, and practice so worth doing.

The dreamer in me is reaching out to us all, to call us all into a more loving support of our own, as well as, others dreams. We need them and the people that are ready to take action towards them, more now than ever.

The Irony of the Dream Killer

In the quiet, and sometimes not so quiet, moments when someone shares their deepest aspirations, we witness one of humanity's most revealing tests. How we respond to another's dreams exposes not only our capacity for love, but the subtle ways we disguise self-interest as care. The dream killer emerges not as a villain, but as someone who has learned to mistake their own comfort for another's wellbeing.

The Illusion of Protection

The dream killer speaks in the gentle cadences of concern, wrapping discouragement in the soft language of love. "I just don't want to see you get hurt,” or “you have everything, why would you through it all away? So many would kill to have your life.” they say, their voice heavy with what appears to be tenderness. Yet beneath this apparent devotion lies a more complex truth: they are protecting themselves from the discomfort of witnessing another's risk, another's potential failure, another's possible departure from the familiar.

This protection masquerades as love but operates from a fundamentally different place. Love asks, "What do you need to flourish?" Self-interest asks, "What do I need to feel secure?" The dream killer, often unconsciously, chooses the latter while believing they have chosen the former. They mistake their own need for predictability as wisdom about another's path.

The Architecture of Limitation

When we examine the dream killer's arguments, we discover they are built not on knowledge of the dreamer's capabilities, but from their own fears. They speak with authority about markets that will reject, talents that will prove insufficient, and dreams that will inevitably crumble. Yet this expertise reveals itself as projection—they are describing not the dreamer's future, but their own relationship with possibility.

The dream killer constructs elaborate scenarios of failure because they themselves have never learned to dance with uncertainty. They cannot imagine success because they have never practiced resilience. They predict abandonment because they have never experienced the kind of love that celebrates another's growth even when it leads away from them.

The Preservation of Status Quo

Perhaps most revealing is how the dream killer's discouragement serves to preserve their own position. A partner who pursues their artistic vision might become less available, less predictable, less controllable. A child who follows an unconventional path might reflect poorly on the parent's judgment, might require explanations to friends and family, might succeed in ways that highlight the parent's own compromises.

The dream killer's advice often contains an unspoken request: "Please don't change in ways that will require me to examine my own choices." They ask the dreamer to remain small not because smallness serves the dreamer, but because it serves the dream killer's need to avoid uncomfortable questions about their own unlived areas of life.

The Counterfeit of Care

True care for another person requires a kind of selflessness that the dream killer cannot access. It demands the willingness to support another's growth even when that growth creates inconvenience, uncertainty, or challenge for ourselves. It asks us to love someone's potential more than we love our own comfort.

The dream killer offers instead a counterfeit version of care—one that prioritizes their own emotional ease over another's authentic development. They would rather see someone they claim to love remain safely constrained than risk the discomfort of watching them struggle toward something meaningful. This is not love but possessiveness, not care but control.

The Subtle Tyranny of Comfort

The dream killer exercises a gentle tyranny, ruling not through force but through the manipulation of guilt and fear. They make their own anxiety about another's choices into the dreamer's responsibility. "You're making me worry," becomes a form of emotional blackmail, suggesting that the dreamer's pursuit of their vision is somehow an act of cruelty toward those who cannot support it.

This dynamic reveals how the dream killer has learned to make their own limitations into other people's problems. Unable to tolerate uncertainty in their own life, they seek to eliminate it from the lives of others. Uncomfortable with risk, they ask those around them to choose safety instead. Their need for control becomes everyone else's cage.

The Revelation of Motive

The dream killer's true motives reveal themselves most clearly in their response to others' success. When someone achieves what they once discouraged, the dream killer rarely expresses pure joy. Instead, they often display complex emotions: surprise that suggests they genuinely expected failure, subtle resentment that reveals their investment in limitation, and sometimes even attempts to claim credit for the success they once predicted would never come.

These responses illuminate the self-serving nature of their original discouragement. If their advice had truly been about the dreamer's wellbeing, they would celebrate being proven wrong. Instead, they often seem disturbed by success that occurred despite their warnings, revealing that their investment was never in the dreamer's happiness but in their own sense of being right.

The Courage of True Love

Genuine love requires a different kind of courage—the courage to support another's dreams even when we cannot understand them, even when they frighten us, even when they might take the dreamer away from us. True love asks us to become cheerleaders for possibilities we cannot imagine, advocates for paths we would never choose, supporters of risks we would never take.

This kind of love demands that we examine our own motives, that we separate our fears from our wisdom, that we distinguish between what serves us and what serves another. It requires us to love someone's growth more than we love our own sense of security.

The Choice of Consciousness

The dream killer's irony serves as an invitation to consciousness. It asks us to examine the gap between what we say we want for others and what we actually support. It challenges us to notice when our advice serves our own comfort more than another's flourishing. It invites us to consider whether our "protection" of others is actually protection of ourselves.

When someone shares their dreams with us, we stand at a crossroads. We can choose the path of genuine love—uncertain, sometimes uncomfortable, but ultimately liberating for both parties. Or we can choose the path of the dream killer—safe for us, but ultimately devastating for the relationship and the dreamer's potential.

The most profound irony is that the dream killer, in attempting to protect themselves from the discomfort of another's growth, ultimately destroys the very relationships they sought to preserve. Love that constrains is not love at all, but a form of possession that eventually drives away those it claims to cherish.

In choosing to support another's dreams, we choose not only their flourishing but our own transformation. We discover that love's greatest gift is not the comfort of keeping others small, but the expansion that comes from celebrating their courage to become everything they were meant to be.

cocreated with Claude