The Call of the Dreamer

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 might even come true, but who uses them to lead people after other gods. Proverbs uses the same family of language for the sluggard who “fantasizes his self-importance” while wiser people keep their feet on the ground (Proverbs 14:18; 26:16, MSG). Jeremiah lumps dreamers in with diviners and sorcerers (Jeremiah 27:9), and Jude uses the term for those who reject legitimate authority through their dreaming (Jude 1:8). In every one of these, the dream is self-generated--a private fantasy mistaken for divine authority.

So which kind of dreamer are you? 

Then there's Genesis 37. “Here comes this dreamer,” Joseph's brothers sneer, watching him approach across the field (Genesis 37:19). The Hebrew word there--ba’al--doesn’t mean fantasist at all. The New American Standard Bible lexicon translates this word in several places: as “owner” (14 times), “leader” (6 times), “possessor” (twice); and as one having wisdom (Ecclesiastes 7:12). Joseph’s brothers meant it as an insult. Scripture means it as a diagnosis they didn't know they were making: Joseph was, in fact, the one who would end up leading.

So which kind of dreamer are you? The false-prophet kind, manufacturing your own visions and calling them holy--or the Joseph kind, carrying some inspiration you didn't invent and can't fully explain? Moses had it. Noah had it--for a hundred years he simply “did all that God commanded him” with no evidence yet that the flood was coming (Genesis 6:22). None of them look like the confident, self-made visionaries on that teacher's list. They look more like people who were handed something too large for them and told to carry it anyway.

And here's where the two accounts really part ways. The world's dreamers, on the whole, got to see their dreams come true in their own lifetime--a successful corporate revitalization, a great animation studio, a stirring Nobel recognition. Hebrews 11 tells a stranger story. After cataloguing judges, prophets, and kings who lived entirely by faith, it says this: “These all died in faith, not having received the promises” (Hebrews 11:13). And near the chapter's end: “God having provided some better thing for us, so that apart from us they should not be made perfect” (Hebrews 11:40). These dreamers didn't live to see the dream fulfilled--the one exception being Joseph. The others died still carrying that dream, trusting that God--not their own persistence--would be the one to finish what He started.

A self-made dream is judged by whether you pull it off. A God-given one is judged by whether you stayed faithful to it

That's the real difference between a God-given dream and a self-made one. A self-made dream is judged by whether you pull it off. A God-given one is judged by whether you stayed faithful to it--regardless of whether or not you ever see it arrive.

You can still find dreamers like that, if you look past the motivational lists. George Washington Carver spent decades unlocking uses for the peanut and the sweet potato at Tuskegee, and he refused, again and again, to take credit for it. He said the answers to his research came to him fully formed, sometimes overnight--that without God “drawing aside the curtain,” he'd have been helpless to find them at all (Institute for Creation Research, 2025).

Or take George Frideric Handel, who was broke and creatively spent in 1741, who then wrote the entire Messiah --260 pages, several hours of music--n twenty-four days, barely eating or sleeping. When his servant found him in tears over the Hallelujah Chorus, Handel said he'd seen heaven itself opened before him. At the bottom of the manuscript he wrote three letters: S.D.G. Soli Deo Gloria. To God alone, the glory (CBN News, 2025).

Neither man asked to be admired for his persistence. Both pointed somewhere past themselves. That's the tell: A God-given dream doesn't make its carrier the hero of the story; it makes him or her the delivery system. To God be the Glory!

I don't worry anymore about what it meant that a four-year-old was called the “Class Dreamer.” 

This is, in the end, an echo of the very first chapter of Scripture. God spoke a world into being out of what did not yet exist--the essential shape of every act of dreaming that would follow. When He made us in His image, He built us to do a smaller version of the same thing: to imagine what isn't yet visible, and to labor toward it in trust. Paul writes that we are “God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). The dream was planned for us before we ever felt it stir. Our part is simply to walk into it -- by faith, “for we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7) -- trusting that the same God who spoke light out of darkness can be trusted with whatever it is He has put in us to build.

I don't worry anymore about what it meant that a four-year-old was called the “Class Dreamer.” Rebekah has grown to become an amazing woman of God, serving others selflessly every chance she gets. If the “dreamer” label is the false kind--the private fantasy dressed up as vision--then yes, it's worth worrying about. But if it's the Joseph kind, the kind that gets misunderstood before it ever gets vindicated, then it's not a warning at all. It's a calling. And it was 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.

Sources:

CBN News. (2025, December 23). The true story behind Handel’s ‘Messiah’ and the day he had a vision of God in heaven. 

Institute for Creation Research. (2025). Man of science, man of God: George Washington Carver. 

The Snappy Den. (2025, January 13). Dreamers who changed the world: 11 visionaries who proved big ideas can become reality.