Dreams of winning the lottery are nearly universal Dreamings of gaining by gambling are daytime dreams. We don’t dream as much about such things at night.
Any of us, at a moment’s notice, can start dreaming about winning a lottery. When the jackpot gets big enough, the daydreams become so real that we are often prompted to buy a ticket.
The bigger the jackpot, the more people dream.
It was the same way during gold rushes. Otherwise sober citizens dropped what they were doing, and went to the gold fields. Few found large amounts of gold.
Fast, quick gain is what we all want. No risk, no work, just big gobs of money dropping into our laps.
Why? It is certainly more respectable to make money by honest labor than to gain it by a fluke. That’s of little matter when the jackpot gets big enough. We will allow ourselves to become deflected from a safe path upon which steady progress may be made in order to make an “easy gain” when the gain becomes big enough in relationship to the cost of being able to “participate”. For all but the winner, “participation” means joining with an expanded number of people who will not win.
Progress has made it easier to “take a flier”. We no longer have to give up family and property to go to the gold fields. We get the same thing by purchasing a lottery ticket and do not overly disrupt our lives.
An intriguing aspect of the “get rich quick” dream is the selection of the lottery number. Many people feel that they should apply some sort of thought to this selection. Others simply “let the machine pick it”.
Sometimes, people will be in front of us at cash registers with long, complicated lists enumerating the numbers they wish to purchase. Their dream is to “outsmart” the lottery.
If, as many believe, the lottery’s selection of a number is truly “random”, there is no way to outsmart it without first understanding how the selection of numbers is not random. Applying a solution to that problem in a “random” manner is another step toward irrationality.
So, “dream” does describe the process by which we can make ourselves poorer by focusing on the opportunity to become wealthy overnight.
