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How to Make All Your Dreams Come True
Imagine this: it’s 2:00 a.m. and you’re still awake on the couch, staring bleary-eyed and foggy-
brained at the television. Why? You don’t know. Inertia simply makes it easier to sit there and
keep watching than to get up and go to bed. So, you watch.
Perfect. This is how I get you: when you’re feeling apathetic and lost and completely passive
in the face of your fate. Nobody sits up staring at a TV at 2:00 a.m. if they have important shit to
do the next day. Nobody struggles with the will to move their ass off the couch for hours on end
unless they’re having some sort of inner crisis of hope. And it’s exactly this crisis that I want to
speak to.
I appear on your TV screen. I’m a whirlwind of energy. There are loud, obnoxious colors,
cheesy sound effects. I’m practically shouting. Yet, somehow, my smile is easy and relaxed. I’m
comforting. It’s as though I’m making eye contact with you and only you:
“What if I told you that I could solve all your problems?” I say.
Pfft, puh-lease, you think. You don’t know the half of my problems, buddy.
“What if I told you I know how to make all your dreams come true?”
Riiiiight, and I’m the fucking tooth fairy.
“Look, I know how you feel,” I say.
Nobody knows how I feel, you reflexively tell yourself, surprised at how automatic the
response is.
“I, too, once felt lost,” I say. “I felt alone, isolated, hopeless. I, too, used to lie awake at night
for no particular reason, wondering if there was something wrong with me, wondering what was
this invisible force standing between myself and my dreams. And I know that’s what you’re
feeling, too. That you’ve somehow lost something. You just don’t know what.”
In truth, I say these things because they are experienced by everybody. They are a fact of the
human condition. We all feel powerless to equalize with the inherent guilt that comes with our
existence. We all suffer and are victimized to varying degrees, especially when we’re young.
And we all spend a lifetime trying to compensate for that suffering.
And in moments of our life when things aren’t going so well, this makes us despair.
But like most people struggling, you’ve enveloped yourself so much in your pain that you’ve
forgotten that pain is common, and that your strife is not uniquely yours—on the contrary, it’s
universal. And because you’ve forgotten this, you feel as if I’m speaking directly to you; as if, by
some magical power, I’m peering into your soul and reading back to you the contents of your
heart. For this, you sit up and at attention.
“Because,” I repeat, “I have the solution to all your problems. I can make all your dreams
come true.” Now I’m pointing, and my finger looks gigantic on your TV screen. “I have all the
answers. I have the secret of everlasting happiness and eternal life, and it’s this . . .”
What I go on to say is so outlandish, so ridiculous, so absolutely perverse and cynical that
you actually think it might be true. The problem is, you want to believe me. You need to believe
me. I represent the hope and salvation your Feeling Brain desperately craves, that it needs. So,
slowly, your Thinking Brain comes to the conclusion that my idea is so batshit crazy that it just
might work.
As the infomercial drags on, that existential need to find meaning somewhere, anywhere,
beats down your psychological defenses and lets me in. After all, I have demonstrated an
uncanny knowledge of your pain, a backdoor entrance to your secret truth, a deep vein traveling
through your heart. You then realize that in between all my big white teeth and shouty words,
I’ve spoken to you: I was once just as fucked as you . . . and I found my way out. Come with me.
I keep going. I’m on a roll now. The camera angles are switching back and forth, grabbing
me now from the side, now from the front. Suddenly, there’s a studio audience in front of me.
They’re wrapped up in every word I say. A woman is crying. A man’s jaw drops. And yours
drops with it. I’m all up in your shit now. I will give you permanent fulfillment, motherfucker. I
will fill any gap, plug any hole. Just sign up for one low price. What is happiness worth to you?
What is hope worth to you? Act now, fucker.
Sign up. Today.
With that, you grab your phone. You go to the website. You put in the digits.
Truth and salvation and everlasting happiness. It’s all yours. It’s coming to you. Are you
ready?
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