All creation begins with a thought. When we become aware that we don’t have something we want, we naturally experience the emotion of lack from not having what we desire. This is how we begin creating through our imagination. It is our natural, innate propensity to be creators at play. The more we think about these things and imagine what it would be like to have them, the more our brain naturally starts creating pictures and images of what our future could look like. This is what it means to dream the dream of the future.

This process begins in the frontal lobe—the brain’s creative center. When it switches on, it begins recruiting circuits in the rest of the brain that are related to things we’ve learned and/or experienced in our lives. As a result, our brain begins firing in new sequences, patterns, and combinations. Each time we do this we’re not only changing our mind—because the mind is the brain in action—but we’re beginning to change our brain.

If we keep thinking about making that future become a reality, we naturally begin to insert ourselves into the scene of our future. According to research on mental rehearsal, once we immerse ourselves in that scene, changes begin to take place in our brain. Therefore each time we do this, we’re laying down new neurological tracks (in the present moment) that literally change our brain to look like the brain of our future. In other words, the brain starts to look like the future we want to create has already happened.

If we are truly engaged in this process with passion, we might begin to emotionally experience our future through thought alone. In fact, when we are feeling the emotions of our future—whether that’s gratitude, joy, freedom, abundance, enthusiasm, love, and so on—the creative thoughts in your mind can become the experience. As the body receives the chemical signals of these emotions, essentially the body is receiving the signal that the event has already occurred. If the latest research on epigenetics tells us that the environment signals the gene, and the end product from an experience in the environment is an emotion, as we embrace the emotion ahead of the environment, we are signaling the gene ahead of the environment.

Since genes make proteins and proteins are responsible for the structure and function of the body, if it’s done properly we reap the physical results of these actions and begin to embody our future before it’s made manifest. In a sense, we are biologically wearing our dream.

No matter what we’re trying to create in our lives, whether it’s a relationship, a job, a house, health, a calm mind, or a peaceful heart, in thinking about those things and desiring them, we may know what we want in thought, however many times we experience the emotion of lack in the way we feel. That’s because we’re conditioned to live in a 3D world and we want immediate gratification or relief from that lack. In other words, if we don’t get what we want right away, the lack from not experiencing it with our senses reinforces the absence of not having it.

Here-in lies our biggest challenge as creators. The lack we live by each day when we notice it hasn’t happened yet causes us to feel separate from our dreams and we no longer believe in our future any longer. That’s because we are back in the emotions of our past—and we can’t see our future through the window of our past. When we live in lack while we are still creating our future, over time we stop creating and wait for something outside of us to take away the lack we feel inside of us. But it is the lack that is keeping our dreams at arm’s length in the first place.

But what if you lived by the emotions of your future every day? You would feel like your future has already happened and less likely to be separate from your dreams. That’s how we believe in a future we have not yet experienced with our senses, yet we keep it alive in our mind and body.