I wrote this a while back as a Thursday’s thirteen, and I thought this would be a good time to repost it here on AWH blog.

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It was triggered by a memory about one of my grade school teachers, who after catching me daydreaming while I gaze out the window, got in my face and shouted, “No daydreamer has ever gotten anywhere!”

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Now that I am older I beg to differ. If this woman was still alive I would have like to talk to her about what she had said to me so long ago, and about trying to crush a young girl’s spirit.

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Crush and embarrassed—I was, but it didn’t stop me. I am to this day a daydreamer.

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If I wasn’t I wouldn’t be an artist or a writer. I proudly proclaim myself to be a stubborn daydreamer.

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As a child I watched too much TV, and I can only blame too many Gilligan’s Island reruns, then being addicted to Survivors when it first came out that let me into—what if’s.

What if a person could survive alone on a deserted island, and found another person washed up on shore?

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What if they fell in love?

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The what if’s turned into daydreams then lead me to write a book Windswept Shores, which will be out Feb. 4, 2010, from Pink Petal books.

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It’s my first book to be published.

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My Daydreams helped create it, the rest was hard work, and I kept my butt firmly planted in my chair.

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Here are thirteen dreamers, and daydreamers:

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1. A daydreamer went on vacation in Spain and dreamed about the speed of light, his name was Albert Einstein.
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2. A daydreamer dreamed about having a bulb that made light, his name was Thomas Edison.
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3. A daydreamer dream the last movements of The Messiah, his name was Frederic Handel.
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4. A daydreamer dreamed about a mocking crow, and wrote poem. His name was Edger Allen Poe.
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5. Two brothers dreamed about flying, their names were Orville and Wilbur Wright.
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6. A daydreamer dreamed of being a kid again and floating down the mighty Mississippi on a raft, or being lost in a cave, or any number of things with a sense of humor. His name was Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain.
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7. A bored socialite daydreamed of being in the South before and during the civil war, her name was Margaret Mitchell.

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8. The popular Beatles tune Yesterday performed over seven million times in the 20th century, came to Paul McCartney in a dream. McCartney one morning, awoke to the memory of a classical string ensemble playing the melody.

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9. A daydreamer dreamed that he “saw” the basic elements of the physical universe arrange themselves in an orderly and beautiful pattern like repeating phrases of music. He woke up and outlined from his dream every element in its correct order – what is now known in chemistry texts as the Periodic Table of Elements. His name was Dmitri Mendeleyev

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10. A daydreamer dreamed about “little people” or “Brownies” who populated his dreams and assisted him with the creative process: “They share plainly in (my) training. They have learned like (me) to build the scene of a considerate story and to arrange emotions in progressive order, only I think they have more talent.” His name Robert Louis Stevenson, his book was he Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

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11. A daydreamer dreamed of sitting on the sun with all the planets hissing around on tiny cords. He won the Nobel Prize for that dream. His name was Niels Bohr, he developed the model of the atom.

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12. Carl Jung wrote of his early dream journals,”All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago. Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them, although at first only in the form of emotions and images. “

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13. A Baptist minister went to Washington and gave a speech called “I have a Dream,” which prompted the 1964 Civil Rights Act. His name was Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Where would we be without our dreamers?