When you were a child, did you dream big dreams?
When I was no more than 3, I remember spending cold winter evenings huddled with my twin sister under our family’s massive antique roll-top desk, making believe we could fly to the stars – but first to our neighbors’ house, the Hochstetlers, for cookies and strawberry milk.
The desk’s narrow cubbies and slender drawers were magic, and we were certain treasure lurked somewhere behind hidden panels of dark oak. In the summertime, before the crops were harvested, we took over the corncrib, which we converted into our own personal imaginarium. Two redheads with identical sprays of freckles across our noses, we acted out who we thought we’d be: writers, dancers, artists, teachers, mothers.
Later, we carved out a private reading space in my father’s basement workshop. Perched on old couch cushions and a worn quilt, we read Karla Kuskin’s Any Me I Want to Be and dreamed of being authors and poets.
What was it about these unremarkable spaces – the desk’s smooth underbelly, the smell of hay, the rattle of the circular saw, the crunch of sawdust beneath our feet – that induced visions of worlds beyond our own?
Dreams, imagination and fantasies are what childhood is made of. We are born with minds that have no limits, minds that are eager to learn, quick to believe that anything is possible. As we grow older, and the spell of childhood lifts, we stop dreaming – or at least limit what we deem is reasonable to dream.
At Vanderbilt there are many dreamers. You may not recognize them, for they are disguised as scientists, chemists, engineers, lawyers, physicists and educators. They come to their seemingly ordinary laboratories and offices and cubicles and begin to dream. They dream of paralyzed legs that walk and deaf ears that hear, they dream of trembling hands made calm, frantic minds made peaceful and missing limbs restored. They imagine and dream and try and fail until they make their dreams reality.
Read all about them in our cover story this issue. And then I hope you take the time to unearth a long-held dream of your own and give it wings to fly.