Do you always dream about winning that big bet where you can buy a:
- big house in the country side or a holiday home?
- lots of flash cars?
- So many clothes you need a whole room to keep them in?
- Top of the range gadgets?
- Whatever you or your family want they will get, no questions asked?
If the answer is YES then you will probably be living in the gamblers dreamworld.
We spend a lot of time while gambling creating images of the great and wonderful things we are going to do with all our money after the big wins come in. We think of ourselves as charming and charitable people.
We dream of providing our friends and family the lavish lifestyle with the rich and famous people being our friends, We will become an A list celeb ( in our eyes)
However we are so far stuck in this dream that there never seems to be a big win big enough to make even the smallest of dreams come true, as true compulsive gamblers do, we bet it again cause we want more and more for the bigger dreams we have.
When I first started betting my dreams started off small. I dreamt of getting new clothes or trainers that I wanted. Going on holiday with my mates, going out every weekend and not having to worry about money.
When I had made all these dreams a reality I started to dream bigger and bigger- getting my own place, learning to drive, having a nice car. But I failed at all of these and just carried on dreaming bigger and bigger, my stakes went up and up to try and fund these dreams but as they went up so did my debts.
The more I dreamt the more my debts went up. It was a horrible cycle I was stuck in, it felt like my life was a rollercoster with no end and no stop button. My life was getting out of control. I then turned to the drink more and more, turned to the drugs all to try and hide away and to take the pain away that the gambling had caused me.
As the months went on all three of my addictions were just getting worse and worse, every time I thought I had hit rock bottom I would always find away to go deeper and deeper down into a rot and depression, There was no way out for me apart from ending it all. This was the first time I had thoughts about ending it all.
When we fail and don’t win the money we gamble recklessly to try and recoup all or at least some of the money back so we can at least have the small dream we wanted. We become desperate to make at least one dream come true. The depths of our misery are impossible to understand as our dream world comes crashing down at a very quick pace.
When we start to come round and get over the lost, we struggle back and start to dream again and convince ourselves that our dreams will come true, it doesn’t matter what anybody else says because we know that our “system” will make us rich and famous.
We believe they will for, without this dream world, life for us would not be tolerable.
Sam Irwin,
