Anais Nin says the difference between the dream and reality is prison. Her dream has been to create an individually perfect world, one in which she writes and is published, she loves and is loved in return. Her reality is that she has difficulty having her writing published or even taken seriously. She has watched from the sidelines as Henry Miller has risen to a fame she had envisioned for herself. Her reality is that she has loved three men in addition to her husband: her father, Henry, and Gonzalo, but none of them is able to give her what she needs, even all of them simultaneously. None of them is able to lead her to the perfect world of which she has dreamed. She feels trapped, imprisoned, with nowhere to go.
This happens to all of us. Even if we attain a dream, we dream a bigger dream, and a bigger dream - there's always a hunger for more. Eventually, in the end, things don't turn out as we imagined and hoped, and we feel like failures, having forgotten all about attaining our original dream(s) and successes. We try to figure out where to go next, what to accomplish next, what to do to feel better about ourselves and our lives. If we get trapped in this thinking, life can feel like a prison that we try to get out of instead of a gift that we enjoy.
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