Write down every dream you've ever had (yes, all of them)

A dream list is a brain dump of everything you've ever wanted to do, be or have, written down without judging any of it. The only rule is that you don't edit as you go. Research on what psychologists call "possible selves" suggests that the futures you can picture clearly have a real pull on what you do, and it's very hard to picture something you've never even written down.

Why do your biggest ambitions never make the list?

Ask most grown-ups for their goals and you'll get a sensible, respectable list. Get fitter, save a bit more, go for the promotion. All good things, and all perfectly reasonable.

What you won't usually hear about is the thing they mentioned once at a dinner party, after the second glass of wine, and never said out loud again. The instrument they always wanted to learn, the year abroad they never took, the book they're sure is in there somewhere, or the little café by the sea.

Those dreams tend to get filtered out very early, usually by a small voice asking "but could you, really?" The moment that voice starts, you stop listing and start negotiating with yourself, and the most interesting ideas never make it onto the page at all, which is a great shame, because they're often the ones that would bring you the most joy.

What does the research say about dreaming?

In 1986 two psychologists, Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius, introduced the idea of "possible selves". These are the versions of yourself you can imagine becoming, both the hopeful ones and the ones you'd rather avoid. Their argument was that these images are far from idle daydreams. They work as incentives, and they shape what you actually attempt in life.

Laura King tested something close to this in 2001. She asked people to write about their "best possible self" for twenty minutes on four days, and found they reported better wellbeing afterwards, along with fewer visits to the health centre over the months that followed.

The thread running through both pieces of work is detail. A future you can see clearly has a lovely way of pulling you towards it, while a vague one tends to stay exactly where it is, somewhere in the back of your mind.

How does My Dreams work in PiViva?

My Dreams is a list with one simple rule, which is that you don't edit.

Write everything down, big and small, sensible and ridiculous. The trip, the qualification, the house, the hobby, and the thing you'd be slightly embarrassed to admit to anyone. There's no feasibility check, and there's no minimum or maximum, so you can't get it wrong.

You can add to it whenever something occurs to you, whether that's on the train, at eleven o'clock at night, or after a film that got under your skin and left you thinking for days.

Some of what you write will stay a dream, and that's absolutely fine; dreams are allowed to just be dreams. But two or three will probably turn out to be goals in disguise, and you'll know which ones they are, because they'll keep tapping you on the shoulder every time you read the list.

What if a dream starts to feel real?

That's the moment to take it into Goal Setting and give it a date and a measure, so it can start becoming part of your actual life.

If you'd like to see the whole picture before you choose, My Ideal Life asks you to describe the life you want in rich detail and then rate how close you are to it today. And if one of your dreams is tangled up with work and money, Ikigai can help you see where what you love might meet what you could be paid for.

If one dream scares you a little more than the others, that's often the one most worth looking at. The Fear Audit will help you work out whether the fear is as big as it feels. You may well find that the thing you've been dreaming about for years is a lot closer than you thought, and that the first step is smaller and more manageable than you ever imagined.