Editor's Note-The Power of Dreams

Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.

—Harriet Tubman

There’s a lot to be said for dreaming big.

There’s even more to be said for working like crazy to make your dreams a reality—especially when folks look at you like you’re more than a bit nuts and urge you wake up and join the real world.

Years ago I worked for a TV station that was owned by Disney. Because we were technically Disney employees, all new hires had to attend something called “Disney University” for a day to be indoctrinated into the Disney experience. As a hardened newsperson, I was supposed to be blasé about the whole ordeal, but to be honest, I found the seminar crazy interesting: That Walt Disney guy was freakin’ brilliant. Who knew cartoons —not to mention a half-baked piece of desert in California and a crummy swath of swampland in the middle of Florida — could become a mega-bazillion-dollar empire someday? Uh…Disney, that’s who.

That little tutorial gave me my first real taste of the true power of one person’s dream: I owed my very job to it.

Certainly, I had learned about the Big Dreamers in school, the people who asked us to do the seemingly impossible: to make the world a better place. The Ghandis, the Mother Theresas, the Martin Luther King Jrs. Unlike ol’ Walt, those folks didn’t die with a fortune in the bank. But they left us with a wealth of possibility: of what we could become if we simply tried. They also demonstrated that turning dreams into reality is a Herculean task, one that even the best, most hard working, most eloquent dreamers may never live to see happen. That doesn’t mean their dreaming was in vain, just that their lives weren’t long enough — and that we must continue to work to bring the dream to life.

Which is why it is a rare thing indeed to stand in the moment of a dream’s birth into actuality. But we here in Central Texas are in that very place, most of us without even knowing it.

This month, an amusement park will open in San Antonio. Called Morgan’s Wonderland, it is the first amusement park in the world designed specifically for special needs kids and their families. On its face, it is nothing like Disneyland: there are no character tie-ins, no movies-come-to-life, no hype, and especially no merchandising. Neither would it lay claim to a vision so great as that of Ghandi et. al. But it does share that singular, powerful, magical ingredient: it began as a dream — that of a father for his special needs daughter (who, not coincidentally, is named Morgan).

Can an amusement park change the world? Well, if you would have asked folks back in 1955, when Disneyland opened, most would have said no. But now we know better.

So I have high hopes for Morgan’s Wonderland, because it’s a dream come true for special needs kids. I don’t know whether it will spawn a lucrative empire. But I do know it will engender imaginative dreams in children who have never had a place like this for themselves. And I can only hope that will, in turn, encourage those kids to work toward making their dreams a reality. Because we could always use another Big Dreamer.

Keep dreaming, my friends — and keep working like mad to make those dreams come true. It’s the only way to change the world.