In Defense of the Dreamers

In Defense of the Dreamers

I’ve always admired the dreamers.

Not the ones with carefully laid five-year plans or vision boards dense with images cut from glossy magazines. No — I mean the ones who carry soft, unreasonable hopes in their back pockets. The people who believe in impossible futures, secret miracles, and the tender audacity of sending love letters in the age of unread messages.

The world will tell you, over and over, to be practical. It insists you keep both feet on the ground, eyes on the road, a sensible job, and a cautious heart. It rewards realism and raises an eyebrow at those who chase things that can’t be charted on a spreadsheet or neatly plotted on a calendar.

And yet, somewhere between the clatter of daily obligations and the sharp, clinical light of routine, dreamers persist.

I think of my old neighbor Mrs. Greene, who used to plant wildflowers in the cracks of the city sidewalk, convinced that color could change a street, maybe even a person. Or my friend Marcus, who’s been writing a novel for nine years — a novel no one but he believes will ever be published. He writes anyway, in the stolen hours before dawn, because the characters in his head won’t let him sleep.

These are the quiet, stubborn dreamers I’m writing this for.

The ones who fall in love with ideas and people who are too good to be true. Who still believe that you can meet someone at a bookstore or fall in love at a train station. Who think that maybe, just maybe, there’s a message meant just for them folded inside a fortune cookie or hidden in the lyrics of a song on a late-night drive.

The world calls them foolish. I call them necessary.

Because it’s the dreamers who keep the soft parts of life alive.

When my grandmother was young, she wrote letters to a boy who fought in a war he never returned from. She told me once, when the air was thick with summer heat and old stories, that those letters saved her. Not because she believed he would reply — but because they gave her a reason to keep believing in tenderness in a world gone cruel.

"Some things," she said, "you do for hope, not for outcome."

It stayed with me.

Because dreamers are often mistaken for naive optimists. But there’s a different kind of resilience in hoping for something you know you might never have. In leaving a light on, just in case. In making room for beauty where logic insists there’s none.

They say children are natural dreamers, but I think adults who keep dreaming are the bravest kind. It’s easy to believe in magic before the world teaches you otherwise. It’s something else entirely to keep believing after.

After heartbreak.

After rejections.

After bank statements and funerals and jobs that eat away at your edges.

To keep writing poems, planting gardens, painting skies, building futures no one asked for — that’s a kind of quiet defiance.

And we need them. Desperately.

Because it’s the dreamers who start revolutions. Who fall in love again after divorce. Who see abandoned buildings and imagine bookstores or sanctuaries. Who adopt stray dogs with broken legs and tell them, “You’re safe now.”

They believe in the power of soft things in a hard world.

And sure, their hearts break more easily. They grieve deeply for things others might never notice. A bird with a twisted wing. A goodbye left unsaid. A kindness overlooked.

But they also see the glimmer of something beautiful where others see nothing.

I want to be more like them.

I want to write love letters and leave them in library books for strangers to find. I want to learn the names of wildflowers and believe that some storms come to clear paths. I want to believe in second chances. In people changing. In lost things finding their way home.

I want to defend the dreamers, not because they need it — but because we need them.

Because if no one believes in impossible futures, how will we ever build a better one?

And if no one holds on to hope, even fragile, foolish hope, what’s left for the rest of us to reach for on the dark days?

So here’s to the dreamers.

May their hearts stay soft.

May their stubborn hope be contagious.

And may the world, someday, be kind enough to catch up to them.