Visualizing your ideal future day helps you connect with a vivid felt sense of the desires that your Dream List is pointing towards. It could feel overwhelming to look at a big list of dreams that point in different directions! The Ideal Day brings this into a more human scale, by creating a tiny window into one possible potential future.
In this day, whichever of those dreams you’ve chosen to pursue, imagine that they’ve unfolded beautifully and you’re living the fullest version of yourself. You’re feeling happy, fulfilled, challenged, and excited, and deeply in touch with a sense of meaning and purpose.
For this exercise, it’s important to imagine your ideal future day as vividly as possible. If you’re not much of a visual thinker, lean into whatever senses come alive as you read a fascinating novel. Barbara Sher calls this “real daydreaming,” and describes it as part of the Ideal Day exercise from her 1979 book Wishcraft:
If someone asked you what it would be like if you had a million dollars, you’d probably answer something like, “It would be terrific. I’d have a home by the sea, and a sailboat, and an airplane, and I would . . .”
Stop right there! Any response with the word “would” in it is not real daydreaming. […]“Real daydreaming” is present-tense, first-person, visual, and sequential. In other words, it’s happening. You see, feel, and experience everything that’s going on around you; time passes just as it does in real life, only faster.
Like this: “This is fantastic! I’m sitting here with a million dollars. Let’s see. What shall I do first? . . . OK. I’m in a mansion on a hill above the sea in Maine. My airplane is in a little hangar behind the house. I can see my sailboat rocking down at the dock. It’s a cool, sunny morning, and the whole day stretches ahead of me. . . .”
My Ideal Future Day
Imagine that it’s five years in the future. It’s an ordinary day, a perfectly typical day, not an exceptional day.
Starting from the moment you wake up, write out what it’s like to go through your day, from morning to afternoon to evening. As you go through your day, think about what you’re doing, where you are, and who you’re with.
Write in the present tense, in vivid sensory detail. How are you feeling, as you go through the day? What’s that like, as a feeling in your body, right now?
Some prompts and writing tips:
- There are so many possible paths that lead to beautiful days! If you’re not sure what to choose, for example where you’re living or what you’re doing, just pick the first thing that feels appealing.
- This is not set in stone! It’s fine to revisit it later and write something different that feels deeply good in that moment.
- If you prefer to narrate your ideal day out loud rather than writing it, consider using speech-to-text on your phone, or an automated transcription app like Otter.ai.
- If 5 years doesn’t feel like a good fit, feel free to envision your ideal day at some different time in the future!
My Ideal Future Week
Continuing on from your ideal future day, are there any other elements that feel important to include, in order to round out your ideal future week?
Again, imagine that it’s five years in the future.
You can write this from the perspective of feeling into the week ahead, or reflecting on the past week.
For example:
- What does the rhythm of your week feel like? Are there shifts between weekdays and weekends?
- Are there events or activities that happen on a weekly basis? How do these nourish and enrich your life?
- Where do you go, throughout the week?
- Who are you engaging with? How do you feel, in connection with them?
My Ideal Tomorrow
If any of this visualizing feels unrealistic and unapproachable, a helpful way to ground this is by looking at tomorrow (if tomorrow is a uniquely different day for you, choose the next upcoming day you will be in your regular flow).
In your current context, your current life, what does tomorrow look like, and what would be the most ideal version of how it could go?
Again, start from the moment you wake up, and write out what it might be like to go through your day, from morning to afternoon to evening. How might you incorporate some of what you’re learning from your ideal day into tomorrow? What additions, removals, space, practices might you bring into your day tomorrow? If it really went perfectly?
Now, as you do step into tomorrow, you could check in with this map, in the morning, throughout the day and at night. It’s unlikely that our days ever turn out exactly as planned, given the unexpected nature of life, and you can use an ideal map to orient yourself to an ‘ideal rest of today’ as you go.
…”Okay, so this is what today has been like so far. What else am I wanting and what makes sense to focus on, now, given everything I care about?”