The Call of the Dreamer

Never really about how big the dream was, or how much nerve it took to chase it. It was always about Who put it there;

Joseph J. Bucci , Bio and Archives--September 26, 2026

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We had two daughters within fifteen months of each other, and for a while our whole world was car seats and hair ribbons. By the time our younger daughter, Rebekah, reached her preschool's graduation, we'd found our footing as parents--right up until her teacher pulled us aside and told us, warmly, that she'd nicknamed Rebekah the “Class Dreamer.” I was mortified. A dreamer. What, I wondered, does that promise for a child's future?

Eleven famous “dreamers"

I wasn't wrong to wonder. Being a dreamer still carries a mild disgrace in most rooms--the word suggests someone with their head in the clouds and their feet nowhere near the ground. And yet history keeps handing the title to people who reshaped the world. A recent list made available as a classroom teaching aid (The Snappy Den, 2025) named eleven famous “dreamers,” including: Walt Disney rebuilding after his first studio failed; Steve Jobs returning to Apple after being pushed out of it; Martin Luther King Jr. risking his life for a vision of equality; and Marie Curie pushing past sexism to win two Nobel Prizes (The Snappy Den, 2025). The list's conclusion is stirring, in its way--these people believed in something before the world did, and their dreams turned out to be blueprints, not fantasies.

It's a good list, but it is missing the one thing that would make it true. Every dreamer story locates the dream's engine inside the dreamer--their nerve, their persistence, their refusal to quit. Which raises the question the list never asks: where did the dream come from in the first place? Scripture has been arguing about that question for a very long time, and it uses two entirely different words to do it.

One is a warning. Moses used it in Deuteronomy 13 to describe a false prophet--a “dreamer of dreams” whose signs........

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