Idleness is the devil’s workshop — or so the Puritan’s believed. In school, kids were always getting yelled at to stop daydreaming and pay attention. “You’re wasting time, you’ll never amount to anything…”
Really? IMHO, it’s daydreams that inspire us to try new things, go new places and be more than we already are. Some people call it “visualizing success.” Semantics. However you term it, daydreams spark the excitement in life.
But even more than that, throughout history it’s been the daydreamers who have saved us from stagnation, hardship, hunger and, yes, even tyranny.
Daydreamers are the mothers of invention. When life gets tough, daydreamers retreat — into a personal wilderness of fanciful discontent, a seemingly disordered hodgepodge of imaginings that spawn inspiration, aspiration, and so many of the things the rest of us will eventually take for granted.
Where would we be if some daydreamer, grown sick and tired of lugging stuff around the forest, hadn’t daydreamed the wheel? What if, 233 years ago this Saturday, a bunch of malcontents hadn’t daydreamed what life would be like if they didn’t have to answer to Mad King George, or any king for that matter? What if the Wright Brothers hadn’t daydreamed about that funny thing birds do?
From our first primal ancestors who looked at fire and thought, “Gee, maybe we shouldn’t scream and run away. Maybe we should try cooking some of that dead mastodon instead,” to Stephen Hawking who taught the world new ways of looking at space and time, it’s been the dreamers who have explored the impossible and made it plausible. Like the universe, the mind is an infinite place. It’s filled with infinite possibilities, from romance to rocket ships, and sitting quietly in a comfortable place and letting your thoughts wander is a lot like strapping on survival gear and setting out like, Sir Edmund Hillary, to scale life’s loftiest heights.
Well, almost. 
Happy Almost Birthday, America!
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Hear, hear. And I especially applaud whoever it was who began to investigate what could be done with all those oddball things from the New World, like coffee and chocolate. Thank heavens somebody dreamed about them back then, so that I can dream about them now …
by Sharon Ashwood July 2nd, 2009 at 4:37 pmI think daydreamers tend to be optimistic too!
by Kim Lenox July 2nd, 2009 at 6:51 pmYou’re right, Allison! Dreaming is a very powerful tool for change.
Thank goodness for great imaginations like those possessed by the Wright Brothers and Thomas Edison. Praise the dreamer who first thought of movable type!
by Annette McCleave July 2nd, 2009 at 6:59 pmDaydreaming is my drug of choice.
by Kelly July 2nd, 2009 at 9:10 pmI think that those kind of daydreamers are poets who write verse with vivid images in their thoughts, minds and hearts.
by Kirsten July 3rd, 2009 at 6:13 amLuckily they gave their dreams a voice.
Or we would never have been inspired to follow their imagination and end up with such wonders.
I guess the key is that dreamers also have to be doers!
by Allison Chase July 4th, 2009 at 11:20 amGood point. I suppose that requires getting off the couch, hmm? Unless you’re a writer/dream, and then you can just move to the computer
by Jessa Slade July 5th, 2009 at 7:56 pm