Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely. — William Faulkner

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.

Author: William Faulkner

Insight: There's something true here about the particular isolation of having a vision nobody else can quite see. When you're building something, pursuing a goal, or imagining a future that exists only in your head, you're moving through the world at a different frequency than the people around you. They can see what you're doing, maybe even support it, but they can't actually live inside your dream the way you do. That loneliness isn't exactly sad—it's more the quiet that comes from knowing something deeply that others only understand intellectually. The tricky part is that this loneliness can actually become necessary. The moment you're too concerned with having company in your vision, you start editing it for an audience. You soften the strange parts, the parts that might alienate people. But those strange parts are often exactly where the dream's real energy lives. Some of the most interesting people aren't lonely because they failed at connection; they're lonely because they refused to abandon what they were building to make others more comfortable. That said, dreamers don't have to be isolated forever. The work eventually becomes real—a book, a business, a life nobody could have predicted. And that's when others finally step inside, not as believers in someone else's vision, but as people who can now see what was always there.

Source: Intruder in the Dust, 1948