I recently came across a social media meme that stated “If your dream doesn’t scare you, it’s too small.” Have you ever had an idea that made your heart pound? Or a vision for the future that you were embarrassed to share because it’s just “too ridiculous”? Little children dream freely like this all the time. This one wants to grow up to be an astronaut; this one, president; that one wants to be a ninja turtle. It’s crazy talk, right? I don’t think so. Okay, maybe it is a bit far-fetched to dream of being a mutant reptile, but the practice of dreaming of an extraordinary future, one that cannot be attained solely on one’s own, is a practice that brings order to our lives, not chaos. The childhood habit of turning our minds into playgrounds, is quite healthy, but sadly, discouraged as we grow up. We fear allowing kids (and ourselves) to embrace unattainable delusions, so instead of using dreams to help guide a future that aligns with our deepest heart desires, we steer ourselves into the world of practicality and paved roads. In doing so, I think we instill a reflex to dismiss any dreams that make our hearts pound.

But I don’t think we need to fear dreaming itself. Dreams, even those that rattle us, are a gift. They all start off hazy, grand, and other-worldly. This is no reason to discard them. It’s reason to keep dreaming, to allow the dream to take shape. And it will. To elucidate this point, I’ll share a quite embarrassing, crazy, over-the-top dream I had a few years ago. I was sitting in “puddle duty” as a public school teacher; “puddle” is what we called the cafeteria when it functioned to hold all students whose teachers were absent that day. As I sat surrounded by people who, like me, did not want to be there, I questioned what I was doing. How was I doing anything of value to contribute to something bigger than myself? It was frustrating and depressing, so my mind wandered off to a better place, a daydream in which I was an underground educational revolutionary. Yup, that’s right. I was imagining myself a modern-day hybrid of Socrates and Che Guevara. I distinctly remember thinking, “From now on, I’m not a teacher; I’m a renegade” as music from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly played in my head. Ridiculous. I know. Yet, it was an exhilarating, albeit unnerving, thought—enough so, that I clearly remember that otherwise mundane moment. I didn’t discard the dream, but simply tucked it away as a place to escape to from time to time. I never thought it would take form in reality, but more than a year later I found myself protesting extensive standardized testing and teaching here at Princeton Learning Cooperative, which is part of a larger revolutionary educational movement that embraces freedom in learning. Though the reality may look quite different from the original daydream, I wonder if the reality could ever have manifested without the dream that predated it.

Dreams are funny things. They are wild and boundless, yet they provide the solid foundation on which great plans stand. Goals that are not born of our dreams are often unsound and colorless. So let us embrace the fantastical dreams our hearts produce, and let us encourage them in others. It’s not THAT crazy to dream of being a ninja turtle, after all. When my brother was young, he was obsessed with Donatello (the purple turtle). We thought he wanted to be a turtle. Or a ninja. But it turned out, he loves all things technological just like Donnie the turtle, his first true role model. Today he’s amazing with a computer. So what’s your crazy, heart-pounding dream?