What secret of happiness is greater than to follow your illusions? Robert Lopatin thought it was too late. As a boy, his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small, he had dreamed of becoming a doctor. It must be a very dear and intimate reality for which people will be content to give up a dream. When he went to college, he gave up the idea. Instead, Robert Lopatin went into the family business of manufacturing women’s clothing and employed 400 people. We dream not ourselves, but within us. He stayed there for twenty-seven years! Then he and his father sold their business. If h wished, he could have retired. As quick as thought are dreams. At a friend’s wedding, he sat next to a young man who had just finished medical school. Chatting with the new doctor made Robert Lopatin think about his boyhood dream, tell me what a man dreams, and I will tell you what he loves. And at the young age of fifty-one, Robert Lopatin decided to become a doctor. Dreams are so wonderful that some people stop not short of ascribing them directly to Heaven.

Robert Lopatin graduated in four years from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and served his residency at Monetefiore Medical Center in Bronx, New York. And he loved it– even the one-hundred-hour workweeks and the graveyard shifts. In dreams, the conscience sleeps, and we often stain ourselves with guilt of which we should be incapable in our waking moments. There is something special about these normal people, they do extraordinary things, things that the living are not capable of. “I feel like I died and was born again,” reports Dr. Robert Lopatin. When we receive Christ, we are reborn. In theory, what if he really did die, and his contract with God was not complete so he went to another level? Human behavior is governed by a large number of types of motives, some that are physiological, but many more that are acquired and learned through social interaction, personal experiences, and growth experiences. These physiological requirements are very powerful because survival depends on their satisfaction. Men will dream; the most that can be asked of them is but that the dream be not in too glaring discord with the thing they know.

In the healthy person, adulthood is characterized by a variety of new challenges. If his sense of selfhood is sufficiently developed in adolescence, a young adult will seek to expand that sense of self and awareness, to actualize his potential for growth and creativity. Actualize may be a new word to you. It means to make real, to make actual those characteristics or talents that are present but not yet developed in an individual (such qualities are sometimes called latent). In self-actualization, they newly formed self is motivated to try out new experiences to see what it can do. You may have a dream in your heart that you think is too antiquated to pursue. Another person may have told you that it is too late to do what you desire. However, it is not. Writer Joseph Conrad published his first novel at age forty. Dreams have no regard to consanguinity, a little trance of astonishment. Dr. Robert Lopatin, MD is a full-fledged doctor. He has a practice at 735 Kappock Street, Bronx, New York 10463.

Everyone who has met Dr. Robert Lopatin said he was “Above average, not normal.” Dr. Robert Lopatin says that he, “Is a young doctor, but an old person.” He never married nor had any children and believes that age enhances the quality of his care. Others, like Artist Grandma Moses started painting when she was seventy-five years old—and she still had a twenty-six-year career. Rebecca Jarvis went from being on a TV show called, “Celebrity Apprentice” to hosting the news on CNBC, CBS, and now is the Chief Business and Economic Correspondent for ABC News, New York, and has her own talk show called Real Biz, and she also hosts the World News, Good Morning America, and Nightline. Pursue your dreams, no matter how lofty they may seem, no matter who laughs at you, and tells you it is unrealistic. Do not ask us how we make our dream tally with facts. The glory of a dream is this—that it despises facts, and makes it own. Our dream saves us from going mad; that is enough.