Success Quote by Harry Chapin

Chapin treats aspiration like rent: overdue, non-negotiable, and embarrassingly easy to pretend you’ve already paid. “Good dreams don’t come cheap” flips the feel-good mythology of dreaming into a ledger. The line isn’t anti-hope; it’s anti-fantasy. A “good” dream, in his framing, is one with teeth and consequence, the kind that demands time, discomfort, reputation, maybe money - the stuff people love to call “sacrifice” once it’s safely in the past.

The subtext is a warning about the gentler form of self-betrayal: letting imagination become a sedative. “If you just dream when you’re asleep” is a jab at private longing that never risks daylight. Sleep-dreams are safe; they cost nothing and threaten no routines. Chapin’s point is that costless dreams are also powerless. They don’t “come alive” because nothing has been given to them: no hours, no awkward first attempts, no failed conversations, no stubborn repetitions.

That final cluster - “come alive... to survive” - matters. He’s not only talking about achieving a goal; he’s talking about keeping it from dying under the weight of daily life. Chapin came up in a 1970s singer-songwriter culture that prized storytelling with a conscience, and his work often circled the gap between what people want and what they settle for. This lyric weaponizes plain speech to make ambition feel tactile: if you want the dream to breathe, you have to feed it.