As grand theatrical charades go, it's hardly on a par with Rufus Wainwright's even more preposterous wish-fulfilment exercise, in which he booked out the London Palladium for a note-for-note reconstruction of Judy Garland's legendary Carnegie Hall programme.
Dolan risks sounding as if he has reduced the age-old conundrum of human fulfilment to a maths exercise.
In an exercise in wish fulfilment, she makes her hero into the sort of working class radical about whom it was possible for even the most jittery of middle class householders to feel safe.
The thriller seems at least partly an exercise in wish fulfilment – the central character, Rachel Knight, works as a special trials prosecutor, giving Clark the chance to return, if only in fiction, to the job she once loved.
In fact, the more Abrams talks, the more you realise his entire career – in its movie-making aspects at least – has been an extraordinary exercise in wish-fulfilment, dating back to his childhood.
The desk-breakers it publishes, ruminating on everything from the number of power stations to water quality five years hence, are exercises in wish fulfilment as much as anything.
Manning and Zia say that their play is a celebration of female empowerment but it is arguably less a depiction of life as it is largely lived and more an exercise in liberal wish-fulfilment.
Sony's E3 2015 press conference (read more about it here) was, with the blessing of hindsight and the calmness that comes with emotions having finally settled, an extraordinary exercise in heart-swelling wish-fulfilment like I can't remember in the industry event's long history.
They relied on the past yet it seemed less an exercise in nostalgia and more the fulfilment of something they should have achieved decades ago.
And the unexamined life is not worth living for man…' The Dialecticians may have concluded, following Socrates, that the development and exercise of dialectical skills are themselves the supreme fulfilment of the human self.
Loving ourselves begins with taking care of ourselves: Getting sleep, physical exercise, and eating healthily are basic steps toward fulfilment.
