A Wake-Up Call: How a Dream About Dying Showed Me That The Greatest Regret Is a Lack of Presence
A few nights ago, I had a dream that completely unsettled me.
In the dream, I knew I was about to die. Not in a vague or symbolic way, but with absolute certainty, as though I had only a few hours or a day left. What stayed with me afterward was not fear of pain or fear of death itself. It was something much stranger and heavier, it was grief for existence, grief for Federica.
I remember this overwhelming realization that my life, my exact life, was about to disappear forever. The relationship I have with my husband. The dynamic I have with my parents. The memories, the habits, the conversations, the inside jokes, the places I love, the person I currently am, even the unresolved parts of my life. Everything would vanish. And what hit me hardest was the understanding that none of it could ever be recreated in exactly the same way again.
Most of us move through life with an unconscious assumption that our existence will somehow always continue tomorrow. We assume our relationships, our identity, our routines, and even our unfinished conversations will still be there waiting for us. But in that dream, something shattered that illusion for a moment. It suddenly felt terrifyingly clear that this version of reality is unrepeatable.
I woke up realizing that what devastated me was not the idea of dying. It was the possibility of losing my life without fully living it first.
The strongest emotion in the dream was regret. Not because I had failed, but because I was confronted with the horrifying possibility that I had spent too much of my life evaluating it instead of actually living it. I kept thinking as I cried in my own sleep: did I even realize how lucky I was to be Federica while I had the chance? Did I truly experience my own life, or was I too busy trying to optimize it, perfect it, analyze it, and compare it to what it could still become?
The Illusion of “Having It All”
A few days before the dream, I was walking around Milan for work when I overheard a girl say the phrase “having it all.” And I suddenly realized how deeply this idea has embedded itself into the way so many of us experience adulthood. The idea that a successful life means somehow perfectly balancing career, relationships, beauty, social life, financial stability, travel, wellness, personal growth, family, ambition, experiences, and happiness all at once, while making it look effortless in the process.
I think this idea has quietly damaged a lot of people.
Because the pursuit of “having it all” often creates the exact opposite effect. It turns life into performance. Into constant comparison. Into endless self assessment. You become so focused on whether you are maximizing your existence that you stop existing inside it.
There is always another milestone. Another thing to fix. Another area where you feel behind. And if your life does not fully resemble the idealized version you unconsciously absorbed from culture, social media, productivity culture, or even previous generations, it becomes easy to feel as though something is wrong with you. As though you are failing at life instead of simply living it.
It is ironic because many cultures romanticize slowness. Italians speak about dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing, but very few people truly allow themselves to exist that way anymore. Most of us are mentally elsewhere all the time. Evaluating. Optimizing. Comparing. Performing.
The Danger of Deferred Living: Why We Stop Waiting for Life to Begin
I think many of us live inside what psychologists sometimes call deferred living, the idea that peace, happiness, gratitude, or fulfillment will finally arrive once certain conditions are met. When I earn more. When I become calmer. When this relationship improves. When I solve this problem. When life finally looks exactly how I imagined it would.
But the dream exposed the flaw in that logic. Life was already happening while I was busy waiting for life to begin.
And strangely, waking up from the dream felt almost like experiencing grief without an actual loss. As though my subconscious emotionally rehearsed my own disappearance in order to reorient me. The heaviness I woke up with was painful, but clarifying. It changed the way I looked at ordinary life the next morning. Everything suddenly felt more fragile, but also more sacred.
Even imperfect relationships felt different. I remember thinking about a person who’s dear to me and realizing that while certain things may feel unresolved right now, they are still alive, still unfinished, still capable of transformation. It was as though my brain had shifted from judgment into temporality. From “this is wrong” into “this is still becoming.”
And I think that shift changes something fundamental in people.
It creates more tenderness toward ordinary moments. Less obsession with performative success. Less certainty that there will always be more time later. You start noticing dinners, conversations, random evenings at home, the sound of people laughing in another room, the comfort of familiar routines. You stop seeing life only through the lens of improvement and start seeing it through the lens of existence itself.
Finding Peace in the Present Moment
Recently, my brother and his wife had a baby girl, and there is one video they sent us where she suddenly starts giggling while staring directly at the camera. I realized that whenever I feel overwhelmed, I watch that video. Not because it fixes anything, but because for a few seconds, my mind stops evaluating my life.
A few nights ago, I babysat her while my brother played video games and my sister in law went out to dinner, and I noticed something almost unsettling. While I was with her, my mind became completely quiet. I was not thinking about goals or whether I was where I “should” be in life. I was simply there.
And I realized how much of my sadness often comes not from my actual life, but from the constant assessment of it. As though part of my brain is continuously conducting performance reviews on my existence. Measuring what is missing. Measuring how far there is still left to go.
But babies do not care about any of that. They pull you entirely into the present because they themselves exist entirely inside it.
At one point after the dream, I kept thinking about the way we mourn fictional characters in novels or films. When a beloved character dies, what devastates us is rarely perfection. We grieve them because they felt alive. Because we became attached to their humanity, their contradictions, their unfinished story.
And I realized something unsettling: sometimes we extend more tenderness toward fictional characters than we do toward ourselves while living our own lives.
If Federica were simply a character in a story, would I want her to spend her entire existence anxiously trying to “have it all,” constantly critiquing herself for everything still unresolved? Or would I want her to notice the beauty already surrounding her while the story was still unfolding?
I think that is ultimately what the dream was trying to show me. Not that life must be perfect, or that ambition and longing are wrong, but that there is a difference between wanting more from life and becoming incapable of seeing the beauty of the life you already have while chasing it.
Because one day, this exact version of reality really will disappear. This exact version of you, your relationships as they exist today, your parents at this age, your routines, your dreams, your unfinished conversations, and yes, even your current problems.
And maybe the real challenge of being alive is learning to fully inhabit your life while it is still unfolding, instead of only appreciating it once it becomes a memory.
