We are the dreamers of dreams

What a ridiculous privilege it is to have a job where you get to imagine things that don’t exist yet.

I’m not sure we acknowledge that enough.

To start with nothing more than an idea (sometimes not even a particularly sensible one) and then somehow turn it into a place, an object, a room, an experience, an image, a business, a moment that another human being gets to encounter.

That’s quite something.

And yes, then come the budgets and timelines and practicalities and the inevitable person who needs to know exactly how it’s all going to work before you’ve even worked out what it is.

But before all of that, there’s an idea.

In the words of Mr Willy Wonka:

“We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams.”

I love that.

Because dreaming can sound a bit frivolous. Something we were told not to do at school. A nice thing to do once the serious work is finished.

But I think it is the serious work.

Someone has to imagine the thing before anyone else can make it real.

Someone has to ask, what if?

What if we did it completely differently? What if we made that enormous? What if we put it over there? What if people walked through it, touched it, smelled it, heard it?

What if we asked, could we make it rain indoors?

What if we ignored how it’s usually done for five minutes and imagined how it could be done?

Not every idea will work.

Some of them will be completely impractical.

Good.

We can work that bit out afterwards.

But if we start by only imagining what we already know is possible, we’ve made the world considerably smaller before we’ve even begun.

By dreaming, we get to make things that weren’t here before. Things that people without our creative minds could never even conceive of.

So I say, be the music maker.

Dream a little bigger.

NB: Yes, the original line is from Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s Ode. But my sister and I will always know it as the snozzberry moment.

ODE Verse 4

A breath of our inspiration

Is the life of each generation;

    A wondrous thing of our dreaming

    Unearthly, impossible seeming