Sometimes the seeds for a dream get planted early on by one parent or another. My father was a tool and die maker and I worked for him for a few years and really enjoyed working with him and learning. Then I got an apprenticeship at Dictaphone Corporation making precision gages and I decided it wasn't what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
Going back to when I was a kid of about 11 or 12, my mother was interested in business and investing. She would go to her broker's office several times per week to watch the ticker board. She developed friendships with others who did the same so it was like a social event to go there.
When she found out there was an opening for a broker, she put in a good word for my brother and he became a stock broker. So when I was very young I always heard lots of talk around the house about investing. I thought it was mostly going in one ear and out the other but the seeds were being planted for me to eventually become an investor.
Lots of different things happened in the mean time but that would be too long of a story. The bottom line is: I eventually became an investor and without it I would have been a bum (comparatively speaking). I certainly never dreamed I'd be where I am today, rubbing elbows with the rich and famous.
Oops! The subject is "unfulfilled dreams". Well, I can say that a lot of smaller dreams were unfulfilled along the way.