The Dreams of Doctors: How to Cultivate a New Vision

Did you always want to be a doctor when you grew up? When you first thought about being a doctor, what was it that drove you? Was it a calling, a family expectation to follow in your parent’s footsteps or a challenge to do what they could not? When you first took the modern version of the Hippocratic Oath was it to uphold a relationship based on love for your work or more like an arranged marriage? And if it was the latter, did you eventually fall in love? Where are you in that relationship now?

Many physicians chafe at the word ‘dream’. It sounds too woo-woo. They prefer ‘goal’, something that can be measured and weighed, like our bodies; a destination to be mapped and followed. And the vehicle to get there is known, too, as in weight loss or muscle building. Goals are the stuff of waking, rational existence. Dreams, on the other hand, imply magic, a place we simply find ourselves with no idea of how we got there, as in our nocturnal dreams where we are transported against all logic into an absurd, glorious, non-sensical, or frightening places. Waking dreams, to my way of thinking, are bigger, a stretch, if not impossible; say, to have a million-dollar business and work from the beach.

If your relationship to the practice of medicine is no longer fulfilling — one of the major symptoms of burnout or the path to it — what’s your dream now? What do you want to be when you grow up? What does your perfect day look like? You may notice that no sooner than you begin to imagine your perfect day, a place where you are content and fulfilled, your Inner Critic starts yelling “This is impossible! How would you do that?“ And then, wearing the costume of the Practical One, lists all the reasons why this is impossible. ‘How’, at this stage, is a First Class Dream-Killer. It’s the ego’s way of stifling the dream before it even hits the light of day.

To manifest a new life, one you have not lived before, you must at first ignore the How and forge ahead with the What and the Why — your highest values, perhaps the same one’s that brought you to medicine. You must build out your utopia. What does it look like? Feel like? What’s the climate and terrain? It’s like any dream; it rarely makes sense on the face of it, but there it is. The greatest inventions of humanity started this way. Certainly yours can — and must — too.

So what is your dream? To become a chef? Move off the grid and write a book? Raise llamas on a farm in the Netherlands? Create a cash-based medical practice that sustains you so that you can also take low-income patients on a sliding fee scale?

My hunch is that some of us are terrified to even speak of a new dream because of the light it will shine on where we are now. Current reality might be a bit dingy, a place where you don’t feel heroic, even though that’s the outfit you wear everyday. Delineating a dream can shake the cage of where we are now. The dream is the place where you feel full joy and resonance with your life, and if that’s not where you are now, this might sting a bit. If the gap between here and there is big enough, there is friction, a yearning. This space is essential. This is the space where the fire starts, where transformation is ignited. Dreaming takes courage. It is delicate at first, so keep it close to your heart. Feed it, build it until it is ready to be let out of the bottle. Then and only then, will the How become clear.

The How will appear when your What — and Why — are clear.