essay on your childhood dream

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Dream — The Difficult Path: My Dreams and Goals in Life

The Difficult Path: My Dreams and Goals in Life

Categories: Dream Life Goals

About this sample

Words: 1934 |

10 min read

Published: Jun 5, 2019

Words: 1934 | Pages: 4 | 10 min read

Works Cited

Emmons, R. A. (2003). Flourishing: The positive person and the good life. American Psychologist, 58(1), 100-110.
Hubbard, E. (n.d.). Elbert Hubbard quotes. Goodreads. Retrieved from https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/412-there-is-no-failure-except-in-no-longer-trying
Latham, G. P. (2004). The motivational benefits of goal-setting. Academy of Management Perspectives, 18(4), 126-129.
Pausch, R., & Zaslow, J. (2008). The last lecture. Hachette UK.
Stapp, B. (2009). Myths and realities of professional singing. Indiana University Press.
Turkay, S. (2015). Setting goals: Who, why, how? Journal of Instructional Psychology, 42(1), 8-13.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Dr. Karlyna PhD

Verified writer

Expert in: Life

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

1 pages / 647 words

1 pages / 681 words

1 pages / 547 words

1 pages / 571 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

The Difficult Path: My Dreams and Goals in Life Essay

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Dream

Dream Destination: Imagine your dream destination and describe it in vivid detail, explaining why you would choose to visit this particular place. Personal Goals and Interests: Discuss how your personal [...]

Within the depths of every human heart lies the ember of hope and the spark of dreams. These intangible yet powerful forces shape the course of our lives, giving us purpose and direction. In this essay, we delve into the [...]

Lucid dreaming is a fascinating phenomenon that has captured the interest of researchers and the general public alike. It is a state of consciousness in which a person is aware that they are dreaming and can often control the [...]

For most people, home is a sanctuary where they can unwind and feel secure. It is a place they can retreat to after a long day at work or a busy day with friends. In this essay, I will describe my dream house, which I envision [...]

Let me assume that this letter is read on some kind of grapheme screen wrapped around your wrist or glued to your face. Future must be awesome with High-tech machines! Most probably my words of knowledge are going to be of no [...]

It was two o’clock in the afternoon. I was heading towards the bus station with Mohan after Mrs Wong’s extra class. The sun was beating mercilessly on my back and I could feel my sweat trickling down my spine. I have often [...]

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

Instructions Followed To The Letter
Deadlines Met At Every Stage
Unique And Plagiarism Free

45,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

Meet top uk universities from the comfort of your home, here’s your new year gift, one app for all your, study abroad needs, start your journey, track your progress, grow with the community and so much more.

Verification Code

An OTP has been sent to your registered mobile no. Please verify

Thanks for your comment !

Our team will review it before it's shown to our readers.

School Education /

✍️Essay on Childhood: Samples in 100, 150 and 200 Words

Updated on
Nov 2, 2023

Essay on Childhood: How was your childhood? I bet it was full of adventure, fun and joyful activities. Agatha Christie has rightly said – ‘One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is, I think, to have a happy childhood.’ Childhood memories are considered one of the most beautiful days one can ever experience in their life. Those are the days one can never forget. Well, no amount of words can describe those good old days. Today we will highlight the importance of childhood with some essays on childhood which you can use anywhere.

Table of Contents

1 Importance of Childhood
2 Essay on Childhood in 100 Words
3 Essay on Childhood in 150 Words
4 Essay on Childhood in 200 Words

Importance of Childhood

Childhood is life’s early stage of development where growth and changes rapidly take place A child needs to be nurtured and loved by all their family, friends, and teachers around him. At the same time, the child must have a healthy childhood to have a better mental health lifelong.

Childhood is that stage where young children get to learn about themselves as well as their surroundings. Early childhood is the best time to learn about developing good habits that will help them shape their future and at the same time be good human beings. Children should get into the habit of eating healthy food, getting fresh air, drinking plenty of water and finally doing a lot of exercise. By doing so, this will help them to grow into resilient adults who will be able to handle any situation.

Moreover, a child’s childhood is that period of their lifetime when they get to develop their personalities. Also, it is the time when they must be exposed to a variety of situations to develop into responsible people. It is important to remember that childhood is a time when children learn from their experiences and mistakes, explore various opportunities and create memories from them.

Also Read: Essay on the Importance of the English Language for Students

Essay on Childhood in 100 Words

Childhood is that period when a child is considered to be one of the most carefree and joyful. In this period, a child has a lot of innocence, an unlimited number of opportunities and is naive.

Some of the best childhood memories one can have are learning new things, playing with their friends, spending time with their family and finally learning skills which will help them lifelong. We all can recall those days when we used to play various types of games with our friends in the evening after school. The excitement of finishing our studies and going out, those days of watching our favourite TV shows can never be forgotten.

Apart from all the fun days, childhood is the best time for personal development. We pick up the skills necessary such as communication skills and engage with the world. Each of us develops our distinct interests.

Also Read: Essay on Save Environment: Samples in 100, 200, 300 Words

Essay on Childhood in 150 Words

We all remember that magical period of our lives- Childhood. It was that time of our lives when the world around us was full of excitement when we were surrounded by our close ones and had nothing to worry about. Those days when all we had to do was study, meet friends, go to school and play outside. We all had created our exciting worlds.

One of my most treasured childhood memories is, spending time with family and friends. Those days when we would visit our grandparent’s house, listening to stories during vacations is another of the best memories. All these memories have led to the creation of a unique bond between our family and who we have become as adults.

Apart from all the memories, childhood is the most important period of our lives when we get to learn new things and mould ourselves. It is rightly said that what we learn during our childhood days we get to carry throughout our lives.

How beautiful was that period, when we got to cultivate our talents, pick up new skills, and create our own distinct identities

Also Read: Essay on Unity in Diversity in 100 to 200 Words

Essay on Childhood in 200 Words

Childhood is a magical period of one’s life. Those days of innocence, fun and endless possibilities, oh, how can one forget that It is now that we wish that we had the chance to relive that period once again? How can we forget that time when we created an endless amount of memories which will last a lifetime?

Gone are those days when we fought with our parents to buy us toys or play. With time, the definition of childhood has also changed. Children in the 21st century will now have a unique childhood experience, shaped by the technological advancements and social changes of our time. Now, children have access to information on their electronic devices (iPads/Phones). How can we forget, that children now prefer to use smartphones for entertaining themselves rather than playing outside?

Despite these changes, the meaning of childhood can change no matter if the way of living has changed. Growing children still crave the love, support and guidance which will help them to be responsible adults.

To conclude, everybody’s childhood is a priceless period. Parents and other adults who care for children contribute to their joyful and fulfilled childhood by showing them love, support, and guidance.

The time of life from birth to adolescence is known as childhood. It is a period of fast-paced cognitive, emotional, and physical growth. During this period, children learn and develop, acquiring the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed as adults.

Early experiences have a significant impact on how the brain develops in children.

There is no specified age for childhood. It depends on the person’s brain development. A person aged 18 or 21 can be considered as a child than someone who is 16 or 17.

For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay-writing page and follow Leverage Edu !

Malvika Chawla

Malvika is a content writer cum news freak who comes with a strong background in Journalism and has worked with renowned news websites such as News 9 and The Financial Express to name a few. When not writing, she can be found bringing life to the canvasses by painting on them.

Connect With Us

45,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. take the first step today..

Resend OTP in

Need help with?

Study abroad.

UK, Canada, US & More

IELTS, GRE, GMAT & More

Scholarship, Loans & Forex

Country Preference

New Zealand

Which English test are you planning to take?

Which academic test are you planning to take.

Not Sure yet

When are you planning to take the exam?

Already booked my exam slot

Within 2 Months

Want to learn about the test

Which Degree do you wish to pursue?

When do you want to start studying abroad.

January 2024

September 2024

What is your budget to study abroad?

How would you describe this article ?

Please rate this article

We would like to hear more.

Have something on your mind?

Make your study abroad dream a reality in January 2022 with

India's Biggest Virtual University Fair

Essex Direct Admission Day

Why attend .

Don't Miss Out

Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams Essay

To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
As a template for you assignment

Randy Pausch “last lecture” titled; “ really achieving your childhood dreams, ” elaborates on his achievements and the lessons he learnt during his lifetime. In his presentation, he hopes to inspire other people to fulfill their dreams through his “last lecture,” which has largely been inspired by his experience of having cancer. A lot of people sympathize with him since he has six months to live because of his disease.

Instead of giving up and allowing people to sympathize with him, he continues to do his daily routine. He believes that everyone is responsible for their actions and choices. In any situation, the steps people take after this situation occurred determine the outcomes. For people to succeed, one must have a positive attitude and determination to tackle the challenges.

According to Pausch, there are four important points that people need to do to succeed in life. Pausch expects people to: “bring something to the table, hit brick walls which show you how badly you want something, wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you and don’t bail; the best gold is at the bottom of the barrel of crap” (Carnegie Mellon University, 2007). His “go getter” attitude with military like focus and determination enables him to fulfill most of his dreams.

A knee injury on my seventh grade disrupted my childhood dream of playing in the MSL. The injury became a brick wall in the quest to fulfill my childhood dreams. The injury kept on recurring which forced me to quit soccer.

Mentors and other people whom we interact with help us develop the right fundamentals needed in life. Football coach Jim Graham taught Pausch about fundamentals, and how to use them to meet various goals. Anyone who wants to succeed has to get his fundamentals right. Without fundamentals, it becomes very hard to meet goals and fulfill dreams.

Pausch believes that, “experience is what you get when you did not get what you wanted“ (Pausch, 2007). His competitive spirit made him win a lot of stuffed animals at the country fair. Winning is my passion. Ever since my childhood up to my ninth year, I have won a lot of stuffed animals at the country fair. After my tenth birthday, my passion for stuffed animals reduced drastically.

Pausch believes that everybody “has childhood dreams; such as, being an astronaut, or making movies or video games for a living. Sadly, most people do not meet theirs, and I think that’s a shame” (Pausch, 2007). His positive attitude and philosophies made him fulfill most of his childhood dreams.

Anybody who accomplishes their dream gets a feeling of satisfaction, especially if these are childhood dreams. Most people who do not try to fulfill their childhood dreams end up not achieving their future goals. So far, Pausch has not achieved the dream of playing in the NFL, but he has created a platform at the Carnegie Mellon University where students fulfill their dreams.

At Carnegie Mellon University, Pausch has created Alice, a platform where students are able to do hard assignments using virtual world. A virtual world integrates teamwork and fun to finish hard task. Climate change is a subject that is largely ignored by many, yet we are all experiencing the changes in weather patterns. A virtual world demonstrates how human activities degrade the environment, and it will enable people appreciate and strive to protect the environment. An example of calamity caused by climate change is super storm Sandy.

Pausch’s positive attitude to everything he does highlights the most important part of his presentation. He faces challenges and takes the required measures to solve the problem. In his lecture, he acknowledges that he has terminal cancer and has a few months to live. He also shares his experiences and successes with the world as a way of inspiring people to fulfill their dreams. He continues to inspire people through his videos and books even though he is dead.

Carnegie Mellon University. (2007a). Randy Pausch’s Lecture on Achieving Your Childhood Dreams . Web.

Pausch, R. (2007b). Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams . Carnegie Mellon. Web.

The Analysis of “Carnegie” by Peter Krass
Altruism in Andrew Carnegie's Life
Human Stress and Dale Carnegie
Critique for "Sorry, Strivers: Talent Matters."
What is the value of the examined life?
The Question of Loyalty and Patriotism
Joker One: A Marine Platoon's Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood
Personal Development in James McBride's "The Color of Water"
Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2018, November 20). Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. https://ivypanda.com/essays/really-achieving-your-childhood-dreams/

"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams." IvyPanda , 20 Nov. 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/really-achieving-your-childhood-dreams/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams'. 20 November.

IvyPanda . 2018. "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams." November 20, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/really-achieving-your-childhood-dreams/.

1. IvyPanda . "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams." November 20, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/really-achieving-your-childhood-dreams/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams." November 20, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/really-achieving-your-childhood-dreams/.

You May Already Be Living the Life of Your Childhood Dreams

Personal perspective: how my son showed me the value of unshackling our dreams..

Posted September 13, 2022 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

My 5-year-old's question about what he can be when grows up caused me to examine my own meandering path.
The value of childhood dreams doesn't reside in their attainability, but in what they represent.
While parents are tasked with raising children to exist and thrive in the "real" world, we should take care not to constrain what that could be.
Adopting humility about the unrelenting serendipity of life can help us to aim for the stars without fear or regret, wherever they may be for us.

After poring over a book about the solar system, our 5-year-old informed us that when he grows up he’d like to be an astronomer, but also a drawing guy—he meant an artist—and a school guy (i.e. a teacher).

Making sense of it all

Our son makes a lot of offhand comments just as he’s supposed to be getting into bed. It’s often a procrastination technique, but this comment landed a little differently with me. He’s trying to understand how the world works, and the inputs to this complex equation are everything in his ever-expanding universe. This was a little boy trying to reconcile that week’s excitement about the planets and the moon, and the sun with the rest of his day spent coloring pictures in school.

I kissed the top of his head and told him I thought it was a great plan, but then he asked if he could really do that—be an astronomer, a teacher, and an artist—and I didn’t know what to say. There just aren’t many people who get paid to gaze at the stars and teach and draw. My wife jumped in to tell him that maybe he could teach astronomy to his future students.

“And you could draw for fun like Daddy does,” I added, referring to my hobby of drawing gag cartoons about psychiatry and life in general.

Our son was wholly unimpressed, especially the drawing like Daddy part.

“No, I think that every week I’ll work for three days as an astronomer, and one day as a drawing guy, and one day as a school guy.”

With the decision made, he was able to settle into bed, but his question stayed with me. Is 5 years old the right age to inject reality into his dreams? It couldn’t be, but when does a parent come to own the dour responsibility of stomping on a child’s perfectly harmless fantasies ?

My own winding road

I thought back to my own meandering path. At age 5, I told my parents I wanted to be a doctor so I could work with my father in his office. I seem to remember them telling me I could be whatever I wanted to be if I worked hard enough, and they got me a Fisher-Price doctor kit. With this mantra engrained in my 1980s to 1990s upbringing, it’s become my natural stance whenever our son thinks about his own future.

By age 8, I was going to be a baseball player, but this fantasy would not last even through middle school.

By high school, I was enjoying psychology classes and was writing for the paper, so I thought I’d be a psychologist or a columnist for a newspaper. In college, I watched movies on repeat and wanted to write screenplays that would become smash hits in Hollywood. Unfortunately, none of the stuff I wrote as a college kid in Providence gained any traction with agents in Los Angeles. The rejections scorched me to my core, and I did my best to reassure myself, okay, this is kind of like not getting to be a professional baseball player. It’s okay. What’s next? Then I decided to go to medical school and wrote an essay pronouncing that I had wanted to be a doctor since I was 5.

In those next four years, I kept writing but was more focused on short stories about medicine. I was struck by how rich the world of medicine was in interpersonal drama, character arcs, and pathos. The work of caring for real people inspired great stories and the experiences I had let me practice the art of perceiving people’s stories and reflecting back what I saw. It was a particularly useful skill to have cultivated when I decided to specialize in psychiatry, where much of the job seems to be dependent upon perceiving and reflecting. No field of medicine is so foundationally built upon people’s stories.

An insider's perspective on living with cancer

At age 33, a grown-up by anyone’s standard—especially by my son’s, who recently guessed that I was either 100 or 17 years old—I was dealt an unexpected blow in the form of kidney cancer. In an instant, I had gained the novel and unwelcome perspective of a seriously ill patient while remaining in full possession of my medical knowledge.

At the same time, I used writing to understand my own experience better. Whenever I felt like crying or screaming or even jumping for joy, I put those feelings into essays. I know from my work in psychiatry that putting thoughts and emotions onto the page help to process and integrate them into one’s own psyche. Only then can we move forward or even grow from them.

It was after reading a piece of mine online that a literary agent first approached me, and together we put together a book proposal about finding love and human connection over the course of my psychiatric training. That book by the sheer serendipity of the universe ended up being featured in People magazine, and now I’m working with a team in Hollywood to see if we can make a show out of it.

As I was about to leave my son’s room and turn off the light, I paused.

“You know, bud, I’m kind of like a doctor and a writer and a drawing guy so I think you really can do anything when you’re grown up.”

“I know,” he replied, suddenly sounding very tired. “Night night.”

“Okay. Night.”

Unable to be tamed, planned, or timed, childhood dreams are still worth embracing

Some dreams are ever so far out of reach no matter how much support we have, and life can be torturously unpredictable. But when I stop to remember all of the journey, so much of my life has turned out just the way I hoped. I think of my own parents’ encouragement with gratitude and know that not everyone has that message engrained within them. Wherever the line exists to mark the end of fantasy and the beginning of setting realistic expectations, I haven’t found it yet, and truly I hope I never do.

Adam Stern, M.D. , is the author of Committed: Dispatches from a Psychiatrist in Training due out on July 13, 2021.

Find a Therapist
Find a Treatment Center
Find a Psychiatrist
Find a Support Group
Find Online Therapy
United States
Brooklyn, NY
Chicago, IL
Houston, TX
Los Angeles, CA
New York, NY
Portland, OR
San Diego, CA
San Francisco, CA
Seattle, WA
Washington, DC
Asperger's
Bipolar Disorder
Chronic Pain
Eating Disorders
Passive Aggression
Personality
Goal Setting
Positive Psychology
Stopping Smoking
Low Sexual Desire
Relationships
Child Development
Self Tests NEW
Therapy Center
Diagnosis Dictionary
Types of Therapy

At any moment, someone’s aggravating behavior or our own bad luck can set us off on an emotional spiral that threatens to derail our entire day. Here’s how we can face our triggers with less reactivity so that we can get on with our lives.

Emotional Intelligence
Gaslighting
Affective Forecasting
Neuroscience

“Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”

This speech was originally delivered by Randy Pausch at Carnegie Mellon University in September 2007.

Speech Transcript

It’s wonderful to be here. What [they] didn’t tell you is that this lecture series used to be called The Last Lecture. If you had one last lecture to give before you died, what would it be? I thought, “Damn, I finally nailed the venue and they renamed it.”

So, in case there’s anybody who wandered in and doesn’t know the back story, my Dad always taught me when there’s an elephant in the room, introduce them. If you look at my CAT scans, there are approximately 10 tumors in my liver and the doctors told me three to six months of good health left. That was a month ago, so you can do the math. I have some of the best doctors in the world.

So, that is what it is. We can’t change it and we just have to decide how we’re going to respond to that. We can not change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand. If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you.

And I assure you, I am not in denial. It’s not like I’m not aware of what’s going on. My family, my three kids, my wife, we just decamped. We bought a lovely house in Chesapeake, Virginia, near Norfolk and we’re doing that because that’s a better place for the family to be, down the road.

And the other thing is, I am in phenomenally good health right now. I mean, it’s the greatest thing of cognitive dissonance you will ever see is the fact that I am in really good shape. In fact, I’m in better shape than most of you. So anybody who wants to cry or pity me, can come down and do a few of those and then you may pity me.

All right, so what we’re not talking about today. We’re not talking about cancer. Because I spend a lot of time talking about that and I’m really not interested. If you have any herbal supplements or remedies, please stay away from me.

And we’re not going to talk about things that are even more important than achieving your childhood dreams. We’re not going to talk about my wife, we’re not gonna talk about my kids. Because I’m good, but I’m not good enough to talk about that without tearing up. So, we’re just gonna take that off the table. That’s much more important.

And we’re not gonna talk about spirituality and religion. Although, I will tell you that I have experienced a death bed conversion. I just bought a Macintosh. Now I knew I’d get nine percent of the audience with that, but …

All right, so what is today’s talk about then? It’s about my childhood dreams. And how I’ve achieved them. I’ve been very fortunate that way. How I believe I’ve been able to enable the dreams of others. And to some degree, lessons learned. I’m a professor. There should be some lessons learned. And how you can use the stuff you hear today to achieve your dreams or enable the dreams of others. And as you get older, you may find that enable the dreams of others thing is even more fun.

So, what were my childhood dreams? Well, you know, I had a really good childhood. I mean, no kidding around. I was going back through the family archives and what was really amazing was, I couldn’t find any pictures of me as a kid where I wasn’t smiling. Right? And that was just a very gratifying thing. There was our dog. Awe, thank you. And there, I actually have a picture of me dreaming. And I did a lot of that, you know. There was a lot of, “Wake up!”s, you know?

And it was an easy time to dream. I was born in 1960. Right? When you’re eight or nine years old and you look at the TV set and men are landing on the moon, anything is possible. And that’s something we should not lose sight of. Is that the inspiration and the permission to dream is huge.

So what were my childhood dreams? You may not agree with this list, but I was there. Being in zero gravity. Playing in the National Football League. Authoring an article in the World Book Encyclopedia. I guess you can tell the nerds early. Being Captain Kirk. Anybody here have that childhood dream? Not at CMU, no. I wanted to become one of the guys who won the big stuffed animals in the amusement park. And I wanted to be an Imagineer with Disney. These are not sorted in any particular order, although I do think they get harder, except for maybe the first one.

Okay, so being in zero gravity. Now it’s important to have specific dreams. I did not dream of being an astronaut because when I was a little kid, I wore glasses. And they told me, “Oh, astronauts can’t have glasses.” And I was like, “Mm,” I didn’t really want the whole astronaut gig. I just wanted the floating. So, and as a child, prototype zero point zero. But that didn’t work so well.

And it turns out that NASA has something called the “vomit comet” that they use to train the astronauts. And this thing does parabolic arcs. And at the top of each arc, you get about 245 seconds where you’re ballistic and you get about a rough equivalent of weightlessness for about 25 seconds. And there is a program where college students can submit proposals. And if they win the competition, they get to fly. And I thought that was really cool and we had a team, we put a team together. And they won and they got to fly. And I was all excited ’cause I was gonna go with them. And then I hit the first brick wall because they made it very clear that under no circumstances were faculty members allowed to fly with the teams.

I know, I was heartbroken. Right. I was like, “But, I worked so hard.” And so, I read the literature very carefully and it turns out that NASA, it’s part of their outreach and publicity program. And it turns out that the students were allowed to bring a local media journalist from their hometown. And, Randy Pausch, web journalist. It’s really easy to get a press pass.

So I call up the guys at NASA and I said, “I need to know where to fax some documents.” And they said, “What documents are going to fax us?” I said, “My resignation as the faculty advisor and my application as the journalist.” And he said, “That’s a little transparent. Don’t you think?” And I said, “Yeah, but our project is virtual reality and we’re gonna bring down a whole bunch of VR headsets and all the students from all the teams are going to experience it. And all those other real journalists, are going to get to film it.”

Jim Foley’s going, “Oh, you bastard. Yes.” And the guy said, “Here’s the fax number.” So, and indeed, we kept our end of the bargain. And that’s one of the themes that you’ll hear later on in the talk is, “Have something to bring to the table.” All right? Because that will make you more welcomed.

All right, let’s talk about football. My dream was to play in the National Football League. And most of you don’t know that I actually pl- No. No, I did not make it to the National Football League. But, I probably got more from that dream and not accomplishing it than I got from any of the ones that I did accomplish.

I had a coach. I was signed up when I was nine years old. I was the smallest kid in the league, by far. And I had a coach, Jim Graham, who was six foot four. He had played linebacker at Penn State. He was just this hulk of a guy and he was old school. I mean really old school. Like, he thought the forward pass was a trick play.

And he showed up for practice the first day and, you know, this big hulking guy, we were all scared to death of him. And he hadn’t brought any footballs. How are we gonna have practice without any footballs? And one of the other kids said, “Excuse me, coach, cut there’s no football.” And Coach Graham said, “Right. How many men are on a football field at a time?” So I said, “11 on a team, 22.” And Coach Graham said, “All right and how many people are touching the football at any given time?” “One of them.” And he said, “Right. So we’re gonna work on what those other 21 guys are doing.”

And that’s a really good story because it’s all about fundamentals. Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals. You’ve gotta get the fundamentals down because otherwise, the fancy stuff isn’t gonna work.

And the other Jim Graham story I have is, there was one practice where he just rode me, all practice. Just, “You’re doing this wrong. You’re doing this wrong. Go back and do it again. You owe me. You’re doing pushups after practice.” And when it was all over, one of the other assistant coaches came over and said, “Yeah, Coach Graham rode you pretty hard, didn’t he?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “That’s a good thing.” He said, “When you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore, that means they gave up.” And that’s a lesson that stuck with me my whole life. Is that, when you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a very bad place to be. Your critics are your ones telling you they still love you and care.

After Coach Graham, I had another coach, Coach Setliff and he taught me a lot about the power of enthusiasm. He did this one thing where only for one play at a time, he would put people in at like, the most horrifically wrong position for them. Like all the short guys would become receivers, right? It was just laughable. But we only went in for one play. Right? And boy, the other team just never knew what hit ’em. Because when you’re only doing it for one play and you’re just not where you’re supposed to be and freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, boy, are you gonna clean somebody’s clock for that one play. And that kind of enthusiasm was great.

And to this day, I am most comfortable on a football field. I mean, it’s just one of those things where, if I’m working a hard problem, people will see me wandering the halls with one of these things. And that’s just because, you know, when you do something young enough and you train for it, it just becomes a part of you. And I’m very glad that football was a part of my life. And if I didn’t get the dream of playing in the NFL, that’s okay. I probably got stuff more valuable. Because looking at what’s going on in the NFL, I’m not sure those guys are doing so great right now.

Okay, and so, one of the expressions I learned in electronic arts, which I love, which pertains to this is, “Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.” And I think that’s absolutely lovely.

And the other thing about football is, we send out kids out to play football or soccer or swimming or whatever it is, and it’s the first example of what I’m gonna call a head fake or indirect learning. We actually don’t want our kids to learn football. I mean, yeah, it’s really nice that I have a wonderful three point stance and that I know how to do a chop block and all this kind of stuff. But, we send our kids out to learn much more important things. Team work, sportsmanship, perseverance, et cetera, et cetera. And these kinds of head fake learnings are absolutely important. And you should keep your eye out for them because they’re everywhere.

All right, a simple one, being an author in the World Book Encyclopedia. When I was a kid, we had the World Book Encyclopedia on the shelf. For the freshman, this is paper. We used to have these things called books. And after I had become somewhat of an authority on virtual reality, but not like a really important one, so I was at the level of people at the World Book would badger. They called me up and I wrote an article. And this is Katelyn Kellaher. There’s an article, if you go to your local library where they still have copies of the World Book, look under V for virtual reality and there it is.

And all I have to say is that, having been selected to be an author in the World Book Encyclopedia, I know believe that Wikipedia is a perfectly fine source for your information because I know what the quality control is for real encyclopedias. They let me in.

All right, next one. At a certain point, you just realize there’s some things you’re not gonna do, so maybe you just want to stand close the people. And, I mean, my god, what a role model for young people. I mean, this is everything you want to be. And what I learned that carried me forward in leadership later is that, you know, he wasn’t the smartest guy on the ship. I mean, Spock was pretty smart and McCoy was the doctor and Scottie was the engineer. And you sort of go, and what skill set did he have to get on this damn thing and run it?

And clearly there’s this skill set called leadership. And whether or not you like the series, there’s no doubt that there was a lot to be learned about how to lead people by watching this guy in action. And he just had the coolest damn toys. Right? I mean, my god. I just thought it was fascinating as a kid that he had this thing and he could talk to the ship with it. I just thought that was just spectacular. And of course, now I own one and it’s smaller. So that’s kind of cool.

So, I got to achieve this dream. James T Kirk, his alter ego, William Shatner, wrote a book. Which, I think, was actually a pretty cool book. It was with Chip Walter who’s a Pittsburgh based author who’s quite good. And the wrote a book on basically the science of Star Trek, what has come true. And they went around to top places around the country and looked at various things and they came here to study our virtual reality set up. And so we built a virtual reality for him. It looks something like that. We put it in, put it to red alert. He was a very good sport. It’s not like he saw that one coming. And it’s really cool to meet your boyhood idol. But it’s even cooler when he comes to you to see what cool stuff you’re doing in your lab. That was just a great moment.

All right, winning stuffed animals. This may seems mundane to you, but when you’re a little kid and you see the big buff guys walking around in an amusement park and they got all these big stuffed animals, right? And this is my lovely wife. And I have a lot of pictures of stuffed animals I’ve won. That’s my Dad, posing with one that I won. I’ve won a lot of these animals. There’s my Dad, he did win that one, to his credit. And this was just a big part of my life and my family’s life.

But you know, I can hear the cynics. You know, in this age of digitally manipulated things, maybe those bears aren’t really in the picture with me. Or maybe I paid somebody five bucks to take a picture in the theme park next to the bear. And I said, “How in this age of cynicism can I convince people?” And I said, “I know. I can show them the bears.” Bring them out. You can just put them right there. You can just put them back against the wall.

So here’s some bears. We didn’t have quite enough room in the moving truck down to Chesapeake. And anybody who’d like a little piece of me at the end of this, feel free to come up, first come, first serve.

All right, my next one. Being an Imagineer. This was the hard one. Believe me, getting to zero gravity is easier than becoming an Imagineer. When I was a kid, I was eight years old and our family took a trip cross country to see Disneyland. And if you’ve ever seen the movie National Lampoon’s Vacation, it was a lot like that. It was a quest.

And these are real vintage photographs. And there I am, in front of the castle. And there I am. For those of you who are into foreshadowing, this is the Alice ride. And I just thought this was just the coolest environment I’d ever been in. And instead of saying, “Gee, I want to experience this,” I said, “I want to make stuff like this.”

And so I bided my time and then I graduated with PhD from Carnegie Mellon, thinking that meant me infinitely qualified to do anything. And I dashed off my letters of application to Walt Disney Imagineering and they sent me some of the damn nicest “go to hell” letters I’ve ever gotten. I mean, it was just, “We have carefully reviewed your application and presently, we do not have any positions available which require your particular qualifications.”

Now think about the fact that you’re getting this from a place who’s famous for guys who sweep the street. So that was a bit of a set back. But remember, the brick walls are there for a reason. All right? The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because they brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.

All right, fast forward to 19991. We did a system back at the University of Virginia called “Virtual Reality on Five Dollars a Day”. Just one of those unbelievable spectacular things. I was so scared back in those days as a junior academic. Jim Foley’s here and I just love to tell this story. He knew my undergraduate advisor, Andy VanDamm. And I’m at my first conference and I’m just scared to death and this icon in the user interface community walks up to me and out of nowhere just gives me this huge bear hug. And he says, “That was from Andy.” And that was when I thought, “Okay, maybe I can make it. Maybe I do belong.”

And a similar story is that this was just this unbelievable hit because, at the time, everybody needed a half a million dollars to do virtual reality. And everybody felt frustrated. And we literally hacked together a system for about $5,000 in parts and made a working VR system. And people were just like, “Oh my god.” This like, Hewlett-Packard garage thing. This is so awesome.

And so I’m giving this talk and the room has just gone wild. And during the Q and A, a guy named Tom Ferness, who was one of the big names in virtual reality at the time. He goes up to the microphone and he introduces himself. I didn’t know what he looked like, but I sure as hell knew the name. And he asked a question. And I was like, “I’m sorry, did you say you’re Tom Ferness?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Then I would love to answer your question, but first, will you have lunch with me tomorrow?” And there’s a lot in that little moment. There’s a lot of humility, but also, asking a person where he can’t possibly say no.

And so, Imagineering, a couple of years later was working on a virtual reality project. This was top secret. They were denying the existence of a virtual reality attraction after the time that the publicity department was running the TV commercials. So Imagineering really had nailed this one tight. And it was the Aladdin attraction where you would fly a magic carpet. And the head mounted display, sometimes known as gator vision. And so, I had an in. As soon as the project had just … You know, they started running the TV commercials and I had been asked to brief the Secretary of Defense on the state of virtual reality. Okay, Fred Brooks and I had been asked to brief the Secretary of Defense. And that gave me an excuse. So I called them up, I called Imagineering and I said, “Look, I’m briefing the Secretary of Defense. I’d like some materials on what you have ’cause it’s on of the best VR systems in the world.” And they kind of pushed back. And I said, “Look, is all this patriotism stuff in the parks a farce?” And they’re like, “Mm, okay.” They said, “This is so new that the PR department doesn’t have any footage for you so I’m gonna have to connect you straight through to the team who did the work.” Jackpot.

So I find myself on the phone with a guy named John Snoddy, who is one of the most impressive guys I have ever met. And he was the guy running this team. And it’s not surprising they had done impressive things. And so he sent me some stuff. We talked briefly, he sent me some stuff and I said, “Hey, I’m gonna be out in the area for a conference shortly. Would you like to get together and have lunch?” Translation, I’m going to lie to you and say that I have an excuse to be in the area so I don’t look too anxious. But I would go to Neptune to have lunch with you.”

And so John said sure. And I spent something like 80 hours talking with all the VR experts in the world saying, “If you had access to this one unbelievable project, what would you ask?” And then I compiled all of that and I had to memorize it, which anybody who knows me knows that I have no memory at all. ‘Cause I couldn’t go in looking like a dweeb with, “Hi, question 72 …”

So, I went in and this was like a two hour lunch. And John must have thought he was talking to some phenomenal person because I was doing was channeling Fred Brooks and Ivan Sutherland and Andy VanDamm and people like that. Henry Fooks. So, it’s pretty easy to be smart when you’re parodying smart people.

And at the end of the lunch with John, I sort of, as we say in the business, made the ask. And I said, “You know, I have a sabbatical coming up.” He said, “What’s that?” The beginnings of the culture clash. And so, I talked to him about the possibility of coming there and working with him. And he said, “That’s really good, except, you know, you’re in the business of telling people stuff and we’re in the business of keeping secrets.” And then what made John Snoddy, John Snoddy, was he said, “But we’ll work it out.” Which I really loved.

The other thing that I learned from John Snoddy, I could do easily an hour long talk just on what’ve I learned from John Snoddy. One of the things he told me was that, wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you. He said, “When you’re pissed off at somebody and you’re angry at them, you just haven’t given them enough time. Just give them a little more time and they’ll almost always impress you.” And that really stuck with me. I think he’s absolutely right on that one.

So, to make a long story short, we negotiated a legal contract. It was going to be the first, some people referred to it as the first and last paper ever published by Imagineering. But the deal was, I go, I provide my own funding, I go for six months, I work with the project, we publish a paper.

And then we meet our villain. I can’t be all sweetness and light, because I have no credibility. Somebody’s head’s gonna go on a stick. Turns out that the person who gets his head on a stick is a dean back at the University of Virginia. His name is not important, let’s call him Dean Wormer. And Dena Wormer has a meeting with me where I say I want to do this sabbatical thing. And I’ve actually gotten the Imagineering guys to let an academic in, which is insane. I mean, if John hadn’t gone nuts, this would never have been a possibility. This is a very secretive organization.

And Dean Wormer looks at the paperwork and he says, “Well, it says they’re gonna own your intellectual property.” I said, “Yeah, we got the agreement to publish the paper. There is no other IP. I don’t do patentable stuff.” He says, “Yeah, but you might. So deal’s off. Just get them to change that little clause there and then come back to me.” I’m like, “Excuse me?” And then I said to him, “I want you to understand how important this is. If we can’t work this out, I’m going to take an unpaid leave of absence and I’m just gonna go there and I’m gonna do this thing.” And he said, “Hey, you know, I might not even let you do that. I mean, you’ve got the IP in your head already and maybe they’re gonna suck it out of you so that’s not gonna fly either.”

It’s very important to know when you’re in a pissing match. And it’s very important to get out of it as quickly as possible. So I said to him, “Well, let’s back off on this. Do we think this is a good idea at all?” He said, “I have no idea if this is a good idea.” I was like, “Okay, well we’ve got common ground there.” Then I said, “Well, is this really your call? Isn’t this the call of the dean of sponsored research? If it’s an IP issue?” And he said, “Yeah, that’s true.” So I said, “If he’s happy, you’re happy?” “Yeah, then I’d be fine.” Like Wile E Coyote. And I find myself in Gene Block’s office, who’s the most fantastic man in the world.

And I start talking to Gene Block and I say, “Let’s start at the high level,” since I don’t want to have to back out again. I said, “Let’s start at the high level. Do you think this is a good idea?” He said, “Well, if you’re asking me if it’s a good idea, I don’t have very much information. All I know is that one of my start faculty members is in my office and he’s really excited, so tell me more.” Here’s a lesson for everybody in administration, they both said the same thing. But think-

… they both said the same thing, but think about how they said it. Right? I don’t know. Well, I don’t have much information but one of my star faculty members is here and he’s all excited so I want to learn more. They’re both ways of saying “I don’t know” but boy, there’s a good way and a bad way. So anyway, we got it all worked out. I went to Imagineering. Sweetness and light. And all’s well that ends well.

Some brick walls are made of flesh. So I worked on the Aladdin project. It was absolutely spectacular. I mean, just unbelievable. Here’s my nephew, Christopher. This was the apparatus. You would sit on this sort of motorcycle-type thing and you would steer your magic carpet and you would put on the head-mounted display. The head-mounted display was very interesting. It had two parts and it was a very, very clever design. To get throughput through, the only part that touched the guests’ head was this little cap and everything else clicked onto it, all the expensive hardware. So you could replicate the caps, because they were basically free to manufacture. And, this is what I really did, is I was a cap cleaner.

I loved Imagineering. It was just a spectacular place. Just spectacular. Everything that I had dreamed. I love the model shop. People crawling around on things the size of this room that are just big physical models. It was just an incredible place to walk around and be inspired. I’m always reminded, when I went there and people said “Do you think the expectations are too high?” And I said, “Did you ever see the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?” where Gene Wilder says to the little boy, Charlie, he’s about to give him the chocolate factory and he says, “Well, Charlie, did anybody ever tell you the story of the little boy who suddenly got everything he ever wanted?” Charlie’s eyes get like saucers and he says, “No, what happened to him?” Gene Wilder says, “He lived happily ever after.”

Okay. So, working on the Aladdin VR, I describe it as a once in every five years opportunity and I stand by that assessment. It forever changed me. It wasn’t just that it was good work and I got to be a part of it, but it got me into the place of working with real people and real HCI user interface issues. Most HCI people live in this fantasy world of white collar laborers with PhDs and Masters degrees and, you know, until you got ice cream spilled on you, you’re not doing field work, right?

And, more than anything else, from Jon Snoddy, I learned how to put artists and engineers together, and that’s been the real legacy. We published a paper, just a nice academic cultural scandal. When we wrote the paper the guys at Imagineering said, well, let’s do a nice big picture, like you would in a magazine. And the SIGGRAPH committee, which accepted the paper, it was like this big scandal. Are they allowed to do that? There was no rule. So we published the paper and, amazingly, since then there’s a tradition of SIGGRAPH papers having color figures on the first page. I, so I’ve changed the world in a small way.

And then at the end of my six months, they came to me and they said, “You wanna do it for real? You can stay.” And I said, “No”. One of the only times in my life I have surprised my father. He was like, “You what?” He said, “Since you were, you know, all you wanted, and now you that you got it and you’re like huh?”

There was a bottle of Maalox in my desk drawer. Be careful what you wish for. It was a particularly stressful place. Imagineering, in general, is actually not so Maalox-laden, but the lab I was in … Oh, Jon left in the middle. It was a lot like the Soviet Union. It was a little dicey for a while, but it worked out okay. And, if they had said “Stay here or never walk in the building again”, I would have done it. I would have walked away from tenure. I would have just done it. But they made it easy on me. They said, “You can have your cake and eat it too”. And I basically become a day a week consultant for Imagineering and I did that for about ten years. And that’s one of the reasons you should all become professors, because you can have your cake and eat it too. Okay?

I went on and consulted on things like DisneyQuest. So there was the Virtual Jungle Cruise and the best interactive experience, I think, ever done, and Jesse Schell gets the credit for this, Pirates of the Caribbean. Wonderful at DisneyQuest.

And so, those are my childhood dreams. And, you know, that’s pretty good. I felt good about that. So, then the question becomes, how can I enable the childhood dreams of others? And again, boy, am I glad I became a professor. What better place to enable childhood dreams? Maybe working at EA, I don’t know, that’d probably be a good close second. But, and this started in a very concrete realization that I could do this because a young man named Tommy Burnett, when I was at the University of Virginia, came to me, was interested in joining my research group and we talked about it and he said, “Oh, and I have a childhood dream.” It gets pretty easy to recognize them when they tell you. And I said, “Yes, Tommy, what is your childhood dream?” He said, “I want to work on the next Star Wars film.” Now, you gotta remember the timing on this. Where is Tommy? Tommy is here today. What year would this have been? Your sophomore year?

TOMMY: It was around 1993.

RANDY PAUSCH: Are you breaking anything back there, young man? Okay. All right. So, in 1993. And I said to Tommy, “You know they’re probably not going to make those next movies.” And he said, “No, they are.” And, Tommy worked with me for a number of years as an undergraduate and then as a staff member, and then when I moved to Carnegie Mellon, every single member of my team came from Virginia to Carnegie Mellon except for Tommy because he got a better offer. And he did indeed work on all three of those films. So …

And then I said, well, that’s nice but, you know, one at a time is kind of inefficient. And people who know me know that I am an efficiency freak. So I said, “Can I do this en masse?” Can I get people turned in such a way that they can be turned onto their childhood dreams?

And I created a course, I came to Carnegie Mellon, I created a course called Building Virtual Worlds. It’s a very simple course. How many people have ever been to any of the shows? Okay. So you have a, some of you have an idea. For those of you who don’t, the course is very simple. There are 50 students drawn from all the different departments of the university. There are randomly chosen, randomly chosen teams. Four people per team, and they change every project. A project only lasts two weeks, so you do something, you make something, you show something, then I shuffle the teams. You get three new playmates, and you do it again. And, it’s every two weeks, and so you do five projects during the semester.

The first year we taught this course, it is impossible to describe how much of a tiger-by-the-tail we had. I was just running the course because I wanted to see if we could do it. We had just learned how to do texture mapping on 3D graphics and we could make stuff that looked half decent but, you know, we were running on really weak computers, by current standards. But I said, “I’ll give it a try.” And at my new university I made a couple of phone calls and I said I want to cross list this course to get all these other people. And within 24 hours it was cross-listed in five departments. I love this university. I mean, it’s just, it’s the most amazing place.

And I said, and the kids said, “Well, what content do we make?” I said, “Hell, I don’t know. You make whatever you want.” Two rules: no shooting violence and no pornography. Not because I’m opposed to those in particular but, you know, that’s been done with VR, right? And you’d be amazed how many 19-year old boys are completely out of ideas when you take those off the table. Anyway, so I taught the course.

The first assignment, I gave it to them. They came back in two weeks and they just blew me away. I mean, the work was so beyond, literally, my imagination, because I copied the process from Imagineering’s VR lab but I had no idea what they could or couldn’t do with it as undergraduates and how, because their, and their tools were weaker. And they came back in the first assignment and they did something that was so spectacular that I literally didn’t, ten years as a professor and I had no idea what to do next. So I called up my mentor. I called up Andy Van Dam. And I said, “Andy, I just gave a two week assignment and they came back and did stuff that if I’d given them the whole semester, I’d have given them all A’s. Sensei, what do I do?” And Andy thought for a minute and he said, “You go back into class tomorrow and you look them in the eye and you say, guys, that was pretty good but I know you can do better.” And that was exactly the right advice because what he said was, “You obviously don’t know where the bar should be and you’re only gonna do them a disservice by putting it anywhere.” And, boy, was that good advice because they just kept going.

And during that semester it became this underground thing. I’d walk into a class with 50, with 50 students in it and there were 95 people in the room because it was the day we were showing work. And people’s roommates and friends and parents … I’ve never had parents come to class before. It was flattering and somewhat scary.

And so, it snowballed and we had this bizarre thing of, well, we’ve gotta share this. If there’s anything I’ve been raised to do, it’s to share. And I said, “We’ve gotta show this at the end of the semester. We’ve gotta have a big show.” And we booked this room, McConomy. I have a lot of good memories in this room. And we booked it, not because we thought we could fill it, but because it had the only A/V setup that would work, because this was a zoo. All right? Computers and everything. And then we filled it. And we more than filled it. We had people standing in the aisle.

I will never forget the dean at the time, Jim Morris, was sitting on the stage right about there. We had to kind of scoot him out of the way. And, the energy in the room was like nothing I had every experienced before. And President Cohen, Jerry Cohen, was there and he sensed the same thing. He later described it as like an Ohio State football pep rally, except for academics. And, and he came over and he asked exactly the right question. He said, “Before you start, he said, I gotta know, where are these people from?” He said, “The audience, what departments are they from?” And we polled them and it was all the departments. And I felt very good because I had just come to campus. He had just come to campus. And my new boss had seen in a very corporal way that this is the university that puts everybody together. And, and that made me feel just tremendous.

So we did this campus-wide exhibition and people performed down here. They’re in costume and we project just like this. And you can see what’s going on. You can see what they’re seeing in the head-mount. There’s a lot of big props. So there’s a guy whitewater rafting. This is a fan and E.T. And, yes, I did tell them if they didn’t do the shot of the kids biking across the moon, I would fail him. That is a true story. And I said, I thought I’d show you just one world. And if we can get the lights down, if that’s at all possible. No. Okay. That means no. All right. All right. We’ll just do our best then.

ANIMATED: Oh, hello there. I’m lonely. Make me a world. Yay. Yay. Yay. Yay. Make me some trees. Yay. Yay. Yay.

RANDY: Now, now they’re gonna turn this on it’s head. Watch closely. The world doesn’t want to go on to the next thing in the show. So she’s ready to move on and it’s not.

ANIMATED: What are you doing? You can’t end this now.

ON-SCREEN SPEAKER: But there’s so many other worlds that have to go.

ANIMATED: But our world is the best world. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, No! Here I am.

ON-SCREEN SPEAKER: We’re gonna shut you down. Control-alt-delete.

ANIMATED: Not control-alt-delete! You left us. You left us. We love you. Goodbye.

RANDY PAUSCH: It was an unusual course with some of the most brilliant, creative students from all across the campus. It just was a joy to be involved with. And they took the whole stage performance aspect of this way too seriously. And it became this campus phenomenon every year. People would line up for it. It was very flattering. And, it gave kids a chance, a sense of excitement, of putting on a show for people who were then excited about it. And I think that that’s one of the best things you can give somebody, the chance to show them what it feels like to make other people get excited and happy. I mean, that’s a tremendous gift.

We always tried to involve the audience, whether it was people with glow sticks or batting a beach ball around or driving. This is really cool. This technology actually got used at the Spider-Man 3 premiere in LA, so the audience was controlling something on the screen. So that’s kind of nice.

And, I don’t have a class picture from every year but I dredged all the ones that I do have, and all I can say is that, what a privilege and an honor it was to teach that course for something like ten years. And, all good things come to an end and I stopped teaching that course about a year ago.

People always ask me, “What was my favorite moment?” I don’t know if you can have a favorite moment but, boy, there’s one I’ll never forget. This was a world with, I believe, a roller skating ninja. And one of the rules was that we performed these things live, and they all had to really work, and the moment it stopped working, we went to your backup video tape. And this was very embarrassing. So we had this ninja on stage and he’s doing this roller skating thing and the world, it did not crash gently. And I come out and, I believe it was Steve, wasn’t it? Was it? Where is he? Okay. Where is Steve? Ah. My man. Steve Audio. And talk about quick on your feet. Right? I say, “Steve, I’m sorry but your world has crashed and we’re going to go to videotape.” And he pulls out his ninja sword and says, “I am dishonored. Whaa!” And just drops. And so I think it’s very telling that my favorite moment in ten years of this high technology course was a brilliant ad lib. And then, when the videotape is done and the lights come up, he’s lying there lifeless and his teammates drag him off. It was really a fantastic moment.

And, the course was all about bonding. People used to say, well, you know, what’s gonna make for a good world? I said, “I can’t tell you beforehand” but right before they present it, I can tell you if the world’s good just by the body language. If they’re standing close to each other, the world is good. All right?

And BVW was a pioneering course. And, I won’t bore you with all the details but it wasn’t easy to do, and I was given this when I stepped down from the ETC and I think it’s emblematic. If you’re gonna do anything that’s pioneering, you will get those arrows in the back, and you just have to put up with it. I mean, everything that could go wrong did go wrong, but at the end of the day, a whole lot of people had a whole lot of fun.

When you’ve had something for ten years that you hold so precious, it’s the toughest thing in the world to hand it over. And the only advice I can give you is, find somebody better than you to hand it to. And that’s what I did. There was this kid at the VR studio way back when. And you didn’t have to spend very long in Jesse Schell’s orbit to go, “The Force is strong in this one.” And one of my greatest, my two greatest accomplishments, I think, for Carnegie Mellon were that I got Jessica Hodgins and Jesse Schell to come here and join our faculty. And I was thrilled when I could hand this over to Jesse and, to no one’s surprise, he has really taken it up to the next notch and, you know, the course is in more than good hands. It’s in better hands.

But it was just one course. And then we really took it up a notch and we created what I would call The Dream Fulfillment Factory. Don Marinelli and I got together and, with the university’s blessing and encouragement, we made this thing out of whole cloth that was absolutely insane. Should never have been tried. All the sane universities didn’t go near this kind of stuff, creating a tremendous opportunistic void.

So, the Entertainment Technology Center was all about artisan technologists working in small teams to make things. It was a two year professional Masters degree. And, Don and I were two kindred spirits. We’re very different. Anybody who knows us knows that we’re very different people. And we like to do things in a new way. And the truth of the matter is that we were both a little uncomfortable in academia. I used to say that I’m uncomfortable as an academic because I come from a long line of people who actually worked for a living. So, I detect nervous laughter. All right. And I want to stress, Carnegie Mellon is the only place in the world that the ETC could have happened. By far. The only place.

So, okay. This picture was Don’s idea, okay? And we like to refer to this picture as Don Marinelli on guitar and Randy Pausch on keyboards. But we really did play up the left brain, right brain and it worked out really well that way. Don is an intense guy. And Don and I shared an office. And at first it was a small office. We shared an office for six years. All right? Now, those of you who know Don know he’s an intense guy. Right? And, you know, given my current condition, somebody was asking me … This is a terrible joke but I’m gonna use it anyway … because I know Don will forgive me. Somebody said, “Given your current condition, have you thought about whether you’re gonna go to heaven or hell?” And I said, “I don’t know but if I’m going to hell, I’m due six years for time served.” I kid.

Sharing an office with Don was really like sharing an office with a tornado. Right? There was just so much energy and you never knew which trailer was next, right? But you knew something exciting was gonna happen. And, and there was so much energy. And I do believe in, in giving credit where credit is due. So, in my typically visual way, right? If Don and I were to split the success for the ETC, he clearly gets the lion’s share of it. He did the lion’s share of the work. Okay? He had the lion’s share of the ideas.

It was a great teamwork. I think it was a great ying and a yang, but it was more like ying and yang. Right? And he deserves that credit and I give it to him because the ETC is a wonderful place and, you know, he’s now running it and he’s taking it global. We’ll talk about that in a second. Describing the ETC is really hard and I finally found a metaphor. Telling people about the ETC is like describing Cirque Du Soleil if they’d never seen it. Sooner or later you’re gonna make the mistake, you’re gonna say, “Well, it’s like a circus”. And then you’re dragged into this conversation about, oh, how many tigers? How many lions? Right? How many trapeze acts? And that misses the whole point.

So when we say we’re a Masters degree, we’re really not like any Masters degree you’ve ever seen. Here’s the curriculum … The curriculum ended up looking like this. All I want to do is visually communicate to you that you do five projects in Building Virtual Worlds. Then you do three more. All of your time is spent in small teams making stuff. None of that book learning thing. Don and I have no patience for the book learning thing. It’s a Masters degree. They already spent four years doing book learning, right? By now they should have read all the books. Right?

The keys to the success were that Carnegie Mellon gave us the reigns. Completely gave us the reigns. We had no deans to report to. We reported directly to the provost, which is great because the provost is way too busy to watch you carefully. We were given explicit license to break the mold. It was all project-based. It was intense. It was fun. And we took field trips. Every spring semester in January we’d take all 50 students in the first-year class and we’d take them out to shops at Pixar. We’d take them to Pixar, Industrial Light and Magic. And of course when you’ve got guys like Tommy there acting as host, right? It’s pretty easy to get entrée to these places.

So, we did things very, very differently. The kind of projects students would do, we did a lot of what we’d call edutainment. We developed a bunch of things with the Fire Department of New York. A network simulator for training firefighters using “videogame-ish”-type technology to teach people useful things. That’s not bad. Companies did this strange thing. They put in writing, we promise to hire your students. I’ve got the EA and Activision ones here. I think there are now, how many? Five? … So, there are five written agreements. I don’t know of any other school that has this kind of written agreement with any company. And so that’s a real statement. And these are multiple year things. So they’re agreeing to hire people for summer internships that we have not admitted yet. That’s a pretty strong statement about the quality of the program.

And Don, as I said, he’s now, he’s crazy. And I mean that in a wonderful, complimentary way. He’s doing these things where I’m like, “Oh, my God!” He’s not here tonight because he’s in Singapore because there’s gonna be an ETC campus in Singapore. There’s already one in Australia and there’s gonna be one in Korea. So this is becoming a global phenomenon. So, I think this really speaks volumes about all the other universities. It’s really true that Carnegie Mellon is the only university that can do this. We just have to do it all over the world now. Right?

One of the big successes about the ETC is teaching people about … oh, now I hear the nervous laughter from the students. I had forgotten the delayed shock therapy effect of these bar charts. When you’re taking Building Virtual Worlds, every two weeks we get peer feedback. We put that all into a big spreadsheet and at the end of the semester you’ve had three teammates per project, five projects. That’s 15 data points. That’s statistically valid. And you get a bar chart telling you, on a ranking of how easy you are to work with, where you stack up against your peers. Boy, that’s hard feedback to ignore. Some still managed but … But for the most part, people looked at that and went, “Wow, I gotta, I gotta pick it up a notch. I better start thinking about what I’m saying to people in these meetings.” And that is the best gift an educator can give is to get somebody to become self …

… and that is the best gift an educator can give is to get somebody to become self-reflective.

So the ETC was wonderful, but even the ETC and even as Don scales it around the globe, it’s still very labor intensive. It’s not Tommy one at a time, it’s not a research group 10 at a time. It’s 50 or 100 at a time per campus times four campuses. But I wanted something infinitely scalable, scalable to the point where millions or tens of millions of people could chase their dreams with something. You know, I guess that kind of a goal really does make me the Mad Hatter.

Alice is a project that we’ve worked on for a long, long time. It’s a novel way to teach computer programming. Kids make movies and games, the head fake — again, we’re back to the head fakes. The best way to teach somebody something is to have them think they’re learning something else. I’ve done it my whole career.

The head fake here is that they’re learning to program, but they just think they’re making movies and video games. This thing has already been downloaded well over a million times. There are eight textbooks that have been written about it. 10% of U.S. colleges are using it now, and it’s not the good stuff yet. The good stuff is coming in the next version.

I, like Moses, get to see the promised land, but I won’t get to set foot in it. That’s okay, because I can see it, and the vision is clear: millions of kids having fun while learning something hard. That’s pretty cool. I can deal with that as a legacy.

The next version’s going to come out in 2008. It’s going to be teaching the Java language if you want them to know they’re learning Java; otherwise, they’ll just think that they’re writing movie scripts. We’re getting the characters from the best-selling PC game in history, The Sims. This is all already working in the lab, so there’s no real technological risk. I don’t have time to thank and mention everybody in the Alice team, but I just want to say that Dennis Cosgrove is going to be building this, has been building this. He is the designer, it’s his baby. For those of you who are wondering, “Well, you know, in some number of months, who should I be emailing about the Alice project,” where’s Wanda Dann? Oh, there you are. Stand up, let them all see you.

Everybody say, “Hi, Wanda.”

AUDIENCE: Hi, Wanda.

RANDY PAUSCH: Send her the email.I’ll talk a little bit more about Caitlin Kelleher, but she’s graduated with her Ph.D. and is at Washington University, and she’s going to be taking this up a notch and going to middle schools with it. So grand vision, and to the extent that you can live on in something, I will live on in Alice.

All right, so now the third part of the talk, lessons learned. We’ve talked about my dreams. We’ve talked about helping other people enable their dreams. Somewhere along the way, there’s got to be some aspect of what lets you get to achieve your dreams.

First one is the role of parents, mentors, and students. I was blessed to have been born to two incredible people. This is my mother on her 70th birthday. I am back here. I have just been lapped. This is my dad riding a roller coaster on his 80th birthday, and he points out that, you know, he’s not only brave; he’s talented, because he did win that big bear the same day.

My dad was so full of life. Anything with him was an adventure. I don’t know what’s in that bag, but I know it’s cool. My dad dressed up as Santa Claus, but he also did very, very significant things to help lots of people. This is a dormitory in Thailand that my mom and dad underwrote, and every year, about 30 students get to go to school who wouldn’t have otherwise. This is something my wife and I have also been involved in heavily, and these are the kind of things that I think everybody ought to be doing, helping others.

But the best story I have about my dad is … unfortunately my dad passed away a little over a year ago, and when we were going through his things … he had fought in World War II in the battle of the Bulge … and when we were going through his things, we found out he had been awarded the Bronze Star for valor. My mom didn’t know it. In 50 years of marriage, it had just never come up.

My mom. Mothers are people who love you even when you pull their hair. I have two great mom stories. When I was here studying to get my Ph.D. and I was taking something called the theory qualifier … which I can definitively say is the second worst thing in my life after chemotherapy … and I was complaining to my mother about how hard this test was and how awful it was, and she just leaned over and she patted me on the arm, and she said, “We know how you feel, honey, and remember, when your father was your age, he was fighting the Germans.”

After I got my Ph.D., my mother took great relish in introducing me as, “This is my son. He’s a doctor but not the kind who helps people.”

These slides are a little bit dark, but when I was in high school, I decided to paint my bedroom. I’d always wanted a submarine and an elevator. The great thing about this … what can I say?

The great thing about this is, they let me do it, and they didn’t get upset about it, and it’s still there. If you go to my parents’ house, it’s still there. Anybody who is out there who is a parent, if your kids want to paint their bedroom, as a favor to me, let them do it, okay? It’ll be okay. Don’t worry about resale value on the house.

Other people who help us besides our parents: our teachers, our mentors, our friends, our colleagues. God, what is there to say about Andy Van Dam? When I was a freshman at Brown, he was on leave, and all I heard about was this Andy Van Dam who was like a mythical creature, like a centaur, but like a really pissed off centaur, and everybody was really sad that he was gone but kind of more relaxed. I found out why, because I started working for Andy. I was a teaching assistant for him as a sophomore, I was quite an arrogant young man, and I came in to some office hours, and of course it was 9:00 at night, and Andy was there at office hours, which is your first clue as to what kind of professor he was.

I come bounding in, and, you know, I’m just, I’m going to save the world. There are all these kids waiting for help, da da, da da, da da, da da. Afterwards, Andy literally dutch-uncled … he’s Dutch, right? He dutch-uncled me, and he put his arm around my shoulders, and we went for a little walk, and he said, “Randy, it’s such a shame that people perceive you as so arrogant, because it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish in life.”

What a hell of a good way to word “You’re being a jerk.” Right? He doesn’t say, “You’re a jerk.” He says, “People are perceiving you this way,” and he says, “The downside is, it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish.”

When I got to know Andy better, the beatings became more direct. I could tell you Andy stories for a month, but the one I will tell you is that when it came time to start thinking about what to do after graduating from Brown, it had never occurred to me in a million years to go to graduate school, just out of my imagination. It wasn’t the kind of thing people from my family did. We got, say, what do you call them? Jobs.

Andy said, “No, don’t go do that. Go get a Ph.D. Become a professor.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Because you’re such a good salesman that any company who gets you is going to use you as a salesman, and you might as well be selling something worthwhile like education.”

Andy was my first boss, so to speak. I was lucky enough to have a lot of bosses. That red circle is way off. Al is over here. I don’t know what the hell happened there. He’s probably watching this on the webcast going, “My god, he’s targeting, and he still can’t aim!”

I don’t want to say much about the great bosses I’ve had except that they were great, and I know a lot of people in the world have had bad bosses, and I haven’t had to endure that experience, and I’m very grateful to all of the people that I ever had to report to. They’ve just been incredible.

But it’s not just our bosses. We learn from our students. I think the best head fake of all time comes from Caitlin Kelleher … excuse me, Dr. Caitlin Kelleher … who just finished up here and is starting at Washington University. She looked at Alice when it was an easier way to learn to program, and she said, “Yeah, but why is that fun?”

I was like, “Well, because I’m a compulsive male. I like to make the little toy soldiers move around by my command, and that’s fun.” She’s like, “Hmm.”

She was the one who said, “No, we’ll just approach it all as a storytelling activity.” She’s done wonderful work showing that, particularly with middle school girls, if you present it as a storytelling activity, they’re perfectly willing to learn how to write computer software. So all-time best head fake award goes to Caitlin Kelleher’s dissertation.

President Cohon, when I told him I was going to do this talk, he said, “Please tell them about having fun, because that’s what I remember you for.”

I said, “I can do that, but it’s kind of like a fish talking about the importance of water.” I mean, I don’t know how to not have fun. All right, I’m dying, and I’m having fun, and I’m going to keep having fun every day I have left, because there’s no other way to play it. Right?

So my next piece of advice is, you just have to decide if you’re a Tigger or you’re an Eeyore. I think I’m clear where I stand on the great Tigger-Eeyore debate.

Never lose the childlike wonder. It’s just too important. It’s what drives us. Help others. Denny Proffitt knows more about helping other people. He’s forgotten more than I’ll ever know. He’s taught me by example how to run a group, how to care about people.

M.K. Haley … I have a theory that people who come from large families are better people, because they’ve just had to learn how to get along. M.K. Haley comes from a family with 20 kids. Yeah, unbelievable. She always says, “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.”

When I first got to Imagineering, she was one of the people who dressed me down, and she said, “I understand you’ve joined the Aladdin project. What can you do?”

I said, “Well, I’m a tenured professor of computer science.”

She said, “Well, that’s very nice professor boy, but that’s not what I asked. I said, ‘What can you do?’”

I mentioned sort of my working class roots. We keep what is valuable to us, what we cherish, and I’ve kept my letterman’s jacket all these years. I used to like wearing it in grad school, and one of my friends, Jessica Hodgins would say, “Why do you wear this letterman’s jacket?”

I looked around at all the non-athletic guys around me who were much smarter than me, and I said, “Because I can.”

She thought that was a real hoot, so one year she made for me this little raggedy randy doll. He’s got a little letterman’s jacket too. That’s my all-time favorite. It’s the perfect gift for the egomaniac in your life.

I’ve met so many wonderful people along the way. Loyalty is a two-way street. There was a young man named Dennis Cosgrove at the University of Virginia, and when he was a young man, let’s just say things happened, and I found myself talking to a dean, and the dean … no, not that dean. Anyway, this dean really had it in for Dennis and I could never figure out why, because Dennis was a fine fellow, but for some reason, this dean really had it in for him.

I ended up basically saying, “No, I vouch for Dennis.” The guy says, “You’re not even tenured yet, and you’re telling me you’re going to vouch for this sophomore or junior or whatever?” I think he was a junior at the time. I said, “Yeah, I’m going to vouch for him, because I believe in him.”

The dean said, “And I’m going to remember this when your tenure case comes up.” I said, “Deal.” I went back to talk to Dennis, and I said, “I would really appreciate you … that would be good.” But loyalty is a two-way street. I mean, that was God knows how many years ago, but that’s the same Dennis Cosgrove who’s carrying Alice forward. He’s been with me all these years, and if we only had one person to send in a space probe to meet an alien species, I’m picking Dennis.

You can’t give a talk at Carnegie Mellon without acknowledging one very special person, and that would be Sharon Burks. I joked with her, I said, “Well, look, if you’re retiring, it’s just not worth living anymore.” Sharon is so wonderful, it’s beyond description, and for all of us who have been helped by her, it’s just indescribable.

I love this picture, because it puts her together with Syl, and Syl is great, because Syl gave the best piece of advice pound for pound that I have ever heard, and I think all young ladies should hear this.

Syl said, “It took me a long time, but I’ve finally figured it out. When it comes to men that are romantically interested in you, it’s really simple. Just ignore everything they say and only pay attention to what they do. It’s that simple. It’s that easy.”

I thought back to my bachelor days, and I said, “Damn.”

Never give up. I didn’t get into Brown University. I was on the wait list. I called them up, and they eventually decided that it was getting really annoying to have me call every day, so they let me in.

At Carnegie Mellon, I didn’t get into graduate school. Andy had mentored me. He said, “Go to graduate school. You’re going to Carnegie Mellon. All my good students go to Carnegie Mellon,” and yeah, you know what’s coming.

He said, “You’re going to go to Carnegie Mellon, no problem.” What he had kind of forgotten was that the difficulty of getting into the top Ph.D. program in the country had really gone up, and he also didn’t know I was going to tank my GREs, because he believed in me, which based on my board scores, was a really stupid idea. I didn’t get into Carnegie Mellon. No one knows this till today I’m telling the story. I was declined admission to Carnegie Mellon.

I was a bit of an obnoxious little kid. I went into Andy’s office and I dropped the rejection letter on his desk. I said, “I just want you to know what your letter of recommendation goes for at Carnegie Mellon.”

Before the letter had hit his desk, his hand was on the phone, and he said, “I will fix this.” I said, “No, no, no, I don’t want to do it that way. That’s not the way I was raised. You know, maybe some other graduate schools will see fit to admit me.”

He said, “Look. Carnegie Mellon’s where you’re going to be.” He said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll make you a deal. Go visit the other schools.” Because I did get into all the other schools. He said, “Go visit the other schools, and if you really don’t feel comfortable at any of them, then will you let me call Nico?” Nico being Nico Habermann.

I said, “Okay, deal.” I went to the other schools. Without naming them by name — Berkeley, Cornell — they managed to be so unwelcoming that I found myself saying to Andy, “You know, I’m going to get a job.” And he said, “No, you’re not,” and he picked up the phone, and he talked in Dutch. He hung up the phone, and he said, “Nico says if you’re serious, be in his office tomorrow morning at 8:00 A.M.”

For those of you who know Nico, this is really scary. So I’m in Nico Habermann’s office the next morning at 8:00 A.M., and he’s talking with me, and frankly, I don’t think he’s that keen on this meeting. I don’t think he’s that keen at all.

He says, “Randy, why are we here?”

I said, “Because Andy phoned you?” I said, “Well, since you admitted me, I have won a fellowship, the Office of Naval Research, it’s a very prestigious fellowship. I’ve won this fellowship, and that wasn’t in my file when I applied.”

Nico said, “A fellowship, money, we have plenty of money.” That was back then. He said, “We have plenty of money. Why do you think having a fellowship makes any difference to us?” And he looked at me.

There are moments that change your life, and 10 years later, if you know in retrospect it was one of those moments, you’re blessed, but to know it at the moment with Nico staring through your soul … and I said, “I didn’t mean to imply anything about the money. It’s just that it was an honor. There were only 15 given nationwide, and I did think it was an honor that would be something that would be meritorious, and I apologize if that was presumptuous.” He smiled, and that was good.

So, how do you get people to help you? You can’t get there alone. People have to help you, and I do believe in karma, I believe in paybacks. You get people to help you by telling the truth, being earnest. I’ll take an earnest person over a hip person every day, because hip is short-term. Earnest is long-term.

Apologize when you screw up and focus on other people, not on yourself. I thought, how do I possibly make a concrete example of that? Do we have a concrete example of focusing on somebody else over there? Could we bring it out?

See, yesterday was my wife’s birthday. If there was ever a time I might be entitled to have the focus on me, it might be the last lecture. But no, I feel very badly that my wife didn’t really get a proper birthday, and I thought it would be very nice if 500 people …

Now you all have an extra reason to come to the reception.

Remember, brick walls let us show our dedication. They are there to separate us from the people who don’t really want to achieve their childhood dreams.

Don’t bail. The best of the gold is at the bottom of barrels of crap.

What Steve didn’t tell you was the big sabbatical at EA. I had been there for 48 hours, and they loved the ETC. We were the best. We were the favorites, and then somebody else pulled me aside and said, “Oh, by the way, we’re about to give $8 million to USC to build a program just like yours. We’re hoping you can help them get it off the ground.”

Then Steve came along and said, “They said what? Oh God.”

To quote a famous man, “I will fix this,” and he did. Steve has been an incredible partner, and we have a great relationship, personal and professional, and he has certainly been point man on getting a gaming asset to help teach millions of kids, and, you know, that’s just incredible. But it certainly would have been reasonable for me to leave 48 hours into that sabbatical, but it wouldn’t have been the right thing to do, and when you do the right thing, good stuff has a way of happening.

Get a feedback loop and listen to it. Your feedback loop can be this dorky spreadsheet thing I did, or it can just be one great man who tells you what you need to hear. The hard part is the listening to it.

Anybody can get chewed out. It’s the rare person who says, “Oh, my God, you’re right,” as opposed to, “No wait, the real reason is …” we’ve all heard that.

When people give you feedback, cherish it and use it. Show gratitude. When I got tenure, I took all of my research team down to Disney World for a week, and one of the other professors at Virginia said, “How can you do that?” I said, “These people just busted their ass and got me the best job in the world for life. How could I not do that?”

Don’t complain; just work harder. That’s a picture of Jackie Robinson. It was in his contract not to complain, even when the fans spit on him.

Be good at something; it makes you valuable. Work hard. I got tenure a year early as Steve mentioned. Junior faculty members used to say to me, “Wow, you got tenure early. What’s your secret?”

I said, “It’s pretty simple. Call me any Friday night in my office at 10:00 o’clock and I’ll tell you.”

Find the best in everybody. One of the things that Jon Snoddy, as I said, told me is that you might have to wait a long time, sometimes years, but people will show you their good side. Just keep waiting, no matter how long it takes. No one is all evil. Everybody has a good side. Just keep waiting. It will come out. Be prepared. Luck is truly where preparation meets opportunity.

Today’s talk was about my childhood dreams, enabling the dreams of others, and some lessons learned. But did you figure out the head fake? It’s not about how to achieve your dreams. It’s about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself. The dreams will come to you.

Have you figured out the second head fake? The talk’s not for you. It’s for my kids. Thank you all. Good night.

Thanks for reading. You can get more actionable ideas in my popular email newsletter. Each week, I share 3 short ideas from me, 2 quotes from others, and 1 question to think about. Over 3,000,000 people subscribe . Enter your email now and join us.

James Clear writes about habits, decision making, and continuous improvement. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits . The book has sold over 15 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 50 languages.

Click here to learn more →

All Speeches

Best Childhood Memories Essay Ideas: 94 Narrative Topics [2024]

Many people believe that childhood is the happiest period in a person’s life. It’s not hard to see why. Kids have nothing to care or worry about, have almost no duties or problems, and can hang out with their friends all day long.

An essay about childhood gives an opportunity to plunge into your memories. All you need to do is recollect those happy days and write a brilliant essay! In this article by Custom-Writing.org , you’ll find great tips and topic ideas to kickstart the process.

🔝 Top 10 Topics
💡 Coming Up with Ideas
🧸 Childhood Memories Essay Topics
✍️ Writing Examples & Guide
🔍 References

🔝 Top 10 Childhood Topics to Write About

Your favorite holiday memory.
Your brightest memories of winter.
Your earliest school memory.
Your first visit to a farm.
What was your favorite toy?
Do you remember your granny’s kitchen?
Your childhood memories of your parents.
Your best childhood friend.
Things that you initially disliked at school.
Experiments with physics in childhood.

💡 Coming Up with Childhood Memories Essay Ideas

Perhaps you got lost in your memories and cannot choose the best one to describe in your essay. Or maybe you have a bad memory and cannot recollect something specific to write about. If that’s the case, here are some recommendations for you.

Childhood Memories List: How to Write

Don’t know where to start? Try creating a list of your memories to decide which ones you need for your paper.

There are our top tips on making a childhood memories list:

Write down everything that comes to your mind. What are some significant memories from your childhood? Every little experience starting with your earliest memory matters. Of course, you don’t need all of this information for your essay. Still, it will help your brain to start working in the right direction.
Try to focus on specific things such as holidays, trips, or food. Everybody’s favorite childhood memories are often connected with them. Remarkable events also might include school, neighborhood, hometown, presents you received, and your achievements. Nostalgia is your best friend in this case.
Divide your memories into categories. Good childhood experiences such as receiving a dream present or adopting a pet belong to one category. Life-changing events, key achievements, and unfortunate accidents can go into other categories.
Try not to avoid bad childhood memories. It’s not the most pleasant thing in this task. But sometimes, writing about bad situations or challenges is a good strategic decision for your paper. It can also help your personal growth.

How to Remember Childhood Memories

What is your earliest memory? A frightening fall down the stairs? Or perhaps blowing candles on your second birthday? Whatever the content, it is probably short and vague.

When we grow older, our recollections of early childhood become fragmentary . In fact, a profound memory loss occurs, which psychologists call infantile amnesia (you can learn more about it from the article “ New perspectives on childhood memory ”). Memories formed during early childhood are more fragile than those formed later in life.

That’s why it’s a great idea to write down our childhood recollections. This way, they’ll stay with us even after they lose their rich vividness and start to fade altogether.

Naturally, you can’t keep everything in your head. Some childhood memories will stay with you forever, while others vanish during your teenage years. Remembering something you have forgotten is not an easy task.

Here’s a way out: use this checklist to recall your childhood experiences:

🎵		Use what works better for you:
🧸		They don’t need to be unique or valuable. Look for the things that can tell you a story. It can be:
🤔		Talk with your parents, siblings, or best friends. They can lead you the way. Try to ask specific questions, so it will be easier for them to help you. Also, don’t be afraid to contact your old friends.
📝		It is better to place everything in chronological order. Include the following:

Feeling completely out of ideas? Or maybe you can’t think of a specific topic? Keep reading to learn how to generate new ideas and write a great childhood memories essay.

🧸 Childhood Memory Essays Topics List

Favorite childhood memory ideas.

Meeting Santa at a mall
A gift you’ve created yourself
First time you stayed up all night
Your first visit to an amusement park
Your favorite children’s book or comic
Your best childhood camping memory
The craziest fact you’ve learned as a child
Memory about winning a school competition
What was the most fun school assignment?
Your favorite food at the elementary school cafeteria

Early Childhood Memories Essay Topics

Kindergarten is often the place where kids start socializing for the first time. Think about your experiences with friends and teachers, as well as with your family. These topic ideas will help you get on the right track:

The first day in kindergarten. Kindergarten is a new world for a child. It has an unfamiliar environment, new people, and rules. This essay can aim at discussing feelings and expectations that accompany a child on their first day.
Describe the first pet you had in early childhood. Almost all families have a pet that they love. Often pets are given to children as presents. This essay can relate the best moments spent with a pet when you were little.
A relative who was closest to you in early childhood. Every child has a family member with whom they enjoy spending time. It could easily be a parent, a grandparent, a sibling , or perhaps an uncle. Write about exciting moments related to your beloved relatives.
Your first childhood hobby. Most people had hobbies when they were kids. This initial interest sometimes determines one’s future occupation. Here, you can describe the activities you used to do as a little child. Focus on the events associated with your first hobby.
Festive events in kindergarten. During the whole year, people celebrate many holidays. Naturally, kindergartens hold festive events to amuse children. This essay can portray the unforgettable celebrations in kindergarten.
Describe family gatherings from your childhood.
A typical day in your kindergarten.
What’s the first birthday celebration you remember?
Activities or games in kindergarten.
Your first Halloween costume.
Things that you didn’t like in kindergarten.
Write about your relationship with nature in early childhood.
Describe a performance you took part in when you were little.
What was the best teacher in your kindergarten like?
Discuss the book or story you loved the most in early childhood.

Elementary School Memories Essay Topics

Would you like to look back at your elementary school days? This section is just what you need. Check out these ideas and get inspired:

How you met your first teacher. Teachers lead children through a complicated yet exciting path. That’s why we all remember our teachers, especially the first day of meeting them. This essay can recount the brightest moments associated with this event. Additionally, you might describe the teacher’s appearance and personality .
The most challenging lesson in elementary school. You can probably recall numerous lessons from your school years. This essay can aim at describing positive and negatives aspects of studies, as well as your favorite classes.
Memories about extracurricular activities in school. It could be sports, artistic pursuits, or activities related to specific subjects. Describe your personal preferences and say who inspired you to start doing them.
Celebration events at school. Celebrations create the brightest and most joyful memories. In this essay, you can share personal experiences about such events, be it school performances, shows, or games.
Who was your best school teacher? Describe the personalities of your favorite teachers and explain why you liked them.
Write about a person who helped with school lessons.
What did your first school building look like?
Describe what you daydreamed about in school.
Wonderful hikes or trips organized by the school.
What were your plans for the future growing up?
Write about going to a museum with your class.
Memories of participation in school sports activities.
Recall your participation in writing for a school newspaper.
Did you take part in any important school activities or events?

Happy Childhood Memories Essay Topics

When writing about your childhood, you’d probably prefer recalling happy events rather than sad ones. But what if you don’t know which pleasant memory to choose? This list will help you make up your mind!

The best birthday party ever. Recall the most exciting details associated with it. For example, describe some beautiful presents and a celebratory atmosphere.
The day you’ve met your first love . Write about the impressions, feelings, and the most treasured memories associated with that day.
Recall the best day spent with your childhood friend. Recount the activities and events that made you happy.
The most significant achievement in childhood. Recall your achievements connected with the studies, sports, or arts. You can start by describing the task you’ve had, explain its importance, and thank the people who helped you.
The day you made somebody happy . This essay can describe the instances where you helped others. What were your motivations, and why did it make you happy?
Describe the best school gathering you can remember. Schools often organize parties where students can have fun. This essay can recount the circumstances and special moments related to such a party.
Recall a fictional character you liked the most in childhood.
Write about the best present you gave to someone when you were little.
Describe the best surprise made by friends or relatives in childhood.
The most wonderful journey or trip in childhood.
A sad event that changed things for the better.
What were the happiest summer holidays in your childhood like?
Chronicle the day when your childhood dream came true.
Write about your childhood fear and how you overcame it.
Tell about getting a good grade for an important assignment.
Describe the first home where your family lived.

Funny Childhood Memories Essay Ideas

Writing about a funny event is perhaps the best option you can choose. You’ll enjoy describing it, and your readers will appreciate you for making them laugh! Here are some prompts to kickstart the creative process.

Recollect your childhood actions that make your relatives laugh. Children often behave in interesting, comical, and amusing ways. This essay can detail some fun moments that your parents remember.
Amusing and funny moments in your favorite cartoons. You probably remember many great cartoons from your childhood. What made them funny? Do you still find them entertaining?
The funniest pranks you did at school. If you were a mischievous child, this topic is for you. Recall various funny, elaborate, or even failed pranks you did at school.
Describe the first time you rode a bicycle. Learning to ride a bike is a staple of many childhoods. It’s challenging, but once you master it, you will never forget how to ride it!
What tricks used to help you pass difficult exams? Usually, students make cribs or copy someone else’s answers. You can describe more creative ways of passing exams.
Poking fun at younger siblings. If you have brothers and sisters, you probably tease each other. How do you feel about such activities? Do you both have a good laugh, or did somebody get upset?
Playing superheroes in childhood. Many children have favorite superheroes such as Batman, Spiderman, Ironman, and others. What were your personal favorites? Did you try to imagine you have superpowers?
Describe the most ridiculous haircut you’ve had when you were little.
Funny moments with your school teachers.
Did you have an imaginary friend? What were they like?
Trying to cook in childhood.
What tricks did you use to hide bad marks from your parents?
Attempts to renovate your childhood room.

Childhood Christmas Memories Topics

Christmas is the favorite holiday of many children. Were you one of them? Choose your essay title from this list on Christmas memories:

What is the best Christmas present from your childhood? Describe the present, the wrapping, and your emotions related to it. Why did you want it so much? You can also try to remember where this present is now.
Describe a family Christmas trip that you enjoyed the most as a child. Answer the following questions. What were the new places you have seen? What were the new people you met? How much time did you spend there? Did you feel homesick? What did you feel when you returned home?
What was your favorite pastime during the Christmas holidays in childhood? For example, you can write about watching cartoons or playing with your siblings. Or maybe you enjoyed winter sports and walking with your friends.
Was Christmas your favorite holiday in childhood? Explain why or why not. Create a list of the things that you did and didn’t enjoy. You can also compare Christmas with other holidays. Find several arguments to defend your opinion.
Describe the best Christmas present you gave somebody in childhood. It can be something you made yourself or bought. Explain why you chose this gift and what was the recipient’s reaction. What did you want to show with this present? Was it your idea to give it? How did you choose it? Answer these questions in your essay.
What are your favorite Christmas memories ? You have a wide choice here. You can describe family get-togethers, receiving or giving presents, eating sweets, or having fun while resting from school.
Describe your favorite childhood Christmas photo. Explain why it is so valuable to you. Define the people or objects in the picture. Try to remember who took it and what camera was they used. Also, provide some information about the time and place.
Write about your family’s Christmas traditions.
Describe your favorite Christmas decorations in childhood.
When was the time you stopped believing in Santa Claus?
What was your favorite Christmas movie in childhood?
Write about the Christmas dishes did you enjoy the most as a child.
What was your favorite Christmas TV special ?
What were your favorite Christmas songs when you were little?
Describe the perfect Christmas Eve of your childhood.
Tell about the friends you liked to invite to your Christmas parties.

These recollections can form a great foundation for your essay. Because childhood is often the best time in a person’s life, writing essays on your childhood experiences can be a real pleasure. If you try to be creative and choose a unique topic, you are sure to succeed in writing an impressive essay.

✍️ “My Childhood Memories” Essay Writing Guide

Writing about your childhood is an exciting assignment that has some peculiarities. Let’s explore some of them.

Childhood Memories Essay: Dos and Don’ts

Your main task is to make the reader feel like they’ve experienced the memory you described. There are certain elements that you can include in your essay to make it stand out. Similarly, some things are better to avoid.

✔️ Dos	❌ Don’ts

Keep these things in mind, and you will surely write a perfect composition.

Childhood Memories Essay: Step by Step

Follow these steps of the essay writing process, and you will see that writing a good essay on your childhood memories is not as challenging as it may seem.

The picture shows the main steps in writing a childhood memories essay.

Narrative Essay on Childhood Memories: Outline

Every essay must have a proper structure. That’s why it’s useful to make a short outline before you start writing. It will keep you from losing your way as you write your essay. It also saves you time! If you have a plan, you won’t miss any important points in your essay.

Your paper should include:

✔️	Introduction
✔️	Body Paragraphs	Structure them this way: : express the paragraph’s main point in one statement. : use vivid language and sensory details to depict the memory. : provide some specific examples to make the impression stronger. : tell your reader why your point matters.
✔️	Conclusion

After you’ve finished writing, revise and edit your essay . Make sure your paragraphs are written in a logical order. Read your essay aloud so that you can see how it flows and determine where you need to improve it.

Try our memory-activating prompts and follow these writing tips to compose your perfect childhood memories essay! If you’re not sure that you can write a good paper on your own, you can always ask our experts to help you out.

🔗 References

The Fate of Childhood Memories: Children Postdated Their Earliest Memories as They Grew Older
Can You Trust Your Earliest Childhood Memories?: BBC
How to Start Writing Your Own Childhood Memories for Posterity: HobbyLark
650 Prompts for Narrative and Personal Writing: The New York Times
Bright Side Readers Shared 14 Childhood Stories and We Plunged Into Their Memories Together: Brightside
Great Questions: StoryCorps
Introductions and Conclusions: University of Toronto
Make a List: Childhood Memories: Practical Parenting
Tips to Retrieve Old Memories: Harvard University
Make the Most of Your Memory: 10 Tips for Writing About Your Life: Writer’s Digest
Childhood Christmas Memories: DNA Explained
What Do Your Earliest Childhood Memories Say about You?: The Conversation
Can’t Remember Your Childhood? What Might Be Going On: Healthline
Share to Facebook
Share to Twitter
Share to LinkedIn
Share to email

A List of 272 Informative Speech Topics: Pick Only Awesome Ideas! [2024]

Just when you think you’re way past the question “How to write an essay?” another one comes. That’s the thing students desperately Google: “What is an informative speech?” And our custom writing experts are here to help you sort this out. Informative speaking is a speech on a completely new issue....

435 Literary Analysis Essay Topics and Prompts [2024 Upd]

Literature courses are about two things: reading and writing about what you’ve read. For most students, it’s hard enough to understand great pieces of literature, never mind analyzing them. And with so many books and stories out there, choosing one to write about can be a chore. But you’re in...

A List of 580 Interesting Research Topics [2024 Edition]

In school and college, you will be required to write research papers. Yes — papers in the plural. And that’s the first reason you may want to turn to Custom Writing and seek help with research projects. When assigned a paper, the very first undertaking is to choose from a...

335 Unique Essay Topics for College Students [2024 Update]

The success of any college essay depends on the topic choice. If you want to impress your instructors, your essay needs to be interesting and unique. Don’t know what to write about? We are here to help you! In this article by our Custom-Writing.org team, you will find 335 interesting...

147 Social Studies Topics for Your Research Project

Social studies is an integrated research field. It includes a range of topics on social science and humanities, such as history, culture, geography, sociology, education, etc. A social studies essay might be assigned to any middle school, high school, or college student. It might seem like a daunting task, but...

626 Dissertation Topics for Ph.D. and Thesis Ideas for Master Students

If you are about to go into the world of graduate school, then one of the first things you need to do is choose from all the possible dissertation topics available to you. This is no small task. You are likely to spend many years researching your Master’s or Ph.D....

192 Free Ideas for Argumentative or Persuasive Essay Topics

Looking for a good argumentative essay topic? In need of a persuasive idea for a research paper? You’ve found the right page! Academic writing is never easy, whether it is for middle school or college. That’s why there are numerous educational materials on composing an argumentative and persuasive essay, for...

209 Sports Topics: Argumentative Essay & Persuasive Speech Ideas

Persuasive speech is the art of convincing the audience to understand and trust your opinion. Are you ready to persuade someone in your view? Our list of sports persuasive speech topics will help you find a position to take and defend. If you need more options quick, apart from contents...

Top 100 Research Topics & Titles about Food & TVL

When you look for a good research paper topic, you can easily become the severest critic of any proposed idea. Some topics do not interest you at the very least, while others might shock your teachers. Where is the golden mean? Check out this list of top 100 research paper...

Funny Persuasive Speech Topics: Best Ideas for 2024

Can there possibly be anything fun about academic writing? It seems there is – what are all those fun persuasive speech topics then for, after all? However, creating a bunch of good topics might seem hard the first time around. No need to worry though – there’s always plenty of...

Easy Persuasive Speech Topics: 285 Simple Ideas for 2024

A persuasive speech on any topic is a performance designed to convince people about something and prove your point. Choosing a suitable topic is crucial for your speech’s success. Do you need some help with finding easy topics for a persuasive speech? Then check these fantastic and easy ideas from...

Good Informative Speech Topics: How to Get Thunders of Applause

Do you know the secret place where people go to get their good informative speech topics? Looking for an interesting topic for speech? Congratulations, because you’ve just found it! So, if you’re ready to get some really good topics for an informative speech, all you need to do is to...

This is so helpful. I am very happy now, thank you so much😁.

This is soooo helpful, thank you!

Very helpful. Thank you very much.

It was exactly what I was looking for, thank you

I had to write If you had a time machine where would you go and what would you do and who do you talk to? So I wanted to write about childhood But I couldn’t find that I wanted

I liked your explanation of essay writing. Thank you!

That’s very helpful. Thank you so much.

Very good topics

This post has good memorable ideas.

Essay on My Dream for Students and Children

500+ words essay on my dream.

Everyone has a dream in his life which they want to achieve when they grow up. Some kids want to become rich so that they can buy anything and some want to be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. But only you know that for achieving these goals you have to work hard and stay attentive to it. In this essay on my dream, we are going to discuss the basic things that will help in achieving my dream .

Determination

For turning a dream into reality the first thing that you need is determination. This will help you in a lot of ways. Firstly, it will help you decide the course of action for doing anything. Besides, it will also help you to plan the journey ahead. Also, it will help to take things slow and maintain a steady pace towards the dream.

Moreover, no matter how big my dream planning and setting short term goals will always help. This is important because rushing to your dream will not going to help you in any way. Besides, there is some dream that requires time and they follow a process without following it you cannot achieve that dream.

Staying Motivated

Lack of motivation is one of the main causes that force a person to leave his dream behind. So, staying motivated is also part of the goal. And if you can’t stay positive then you won’t be able to achieve the dream. There are many people out there that quit the journey of their dreams mid-way because they lack motivation .

Keep Remembering Goal

For completing the dream you have to keep your dream in the mind. And remind this dream to yourself daily. There come hard times when you feel like quitting at those times just remember the goal it helps you stay positive . And if you feel like you messed up big times then start over with a fresh mind.

Reward Yourself

You don’t need to cover milestones to reward yourself. Set a small target towards your dream and on fulfilling them reward yourself . These rewards can be anything from toffee to your favorite thing. Besides, this is a good way of self-motivation.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Take Some Breaks

Working towards your goal not mean that you work day and night without stopping. Apart from that, due to continuous efforts, people soon start to become de-motivated. So, taking a break will help your body and mind. For doing so, take a break in between your schedule for some time an engage yourself in other activities.

Stay Among Positive People

Your company affects you in a lot of ways than you can imagine. So, be with people who appreciate you and stay away from people who distract and criticize you.

Don’t Hesitate to Make Mistakes

To sum it up, we can say that dreaming of a goal is far easier than achieving it. And for fulfilling your dream you need a lot of things and also have to sacrifice many things.

Above all, for fulfilling your dream plan and work according to it because it will lead you to the right path. And never forget to dream big because they help in overcoming every obstacle in life.

{ “@context”: “https://schema.org”, “@type”: “FAQPage”, “mainEntity”: [{ “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “What’s the best way to achieve a dream?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “There is no best way for achieving your dream. However, there are certain things that can help you in achieving your dream like being clear to your goal, keep trying, being determinant and several other qualities.” } }, { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “What can be the biggest dream of anyone’s life?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”:”From my point of view being healthy and happy can be the biggest dream of anyone’s life. “} }] }

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

Travelling Essay
Picnic Essay
Our Country Essay
My Parents Essay
Essay on Favourite Personality
Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
Essay on Knowledge is Power
Essay on Gurpurab
Essay on My Favourite Season
Essay on Types of Sports

Download the App

Essay on Childhood

“I don’t want to brush my teeth!”

A classic clash between parental insistence and childhood resistance. The battle unfolds with negotiations, bribes, and sometimes even creative storytelling to coax compliance. This humorous yet relatable scenario captures the essence of childhood, where every mundane task becomes an epic showdown of wills. From bedtime negotiations to playground diplomacy, childhood is a rollercoaster ride of emotions and adventures waiting to unfold. Let’s dive into the delightful chaos of childhood rebellion and discovery.

Key Characteristics of Childhood

Childhood is a distinct and formative stage of life characterized by several key characteristics that shape experiences and development. Here are the key characteristics of childhood:

Watch our Demo Courses and Videos

Valuation, Hadoop, Excel, Mobile Apps, Web Development & many more.

Innocence and Wonder: Children experience innocence, curiosity, and wonder during childhood. Children view the world with fresh eyes, embracing magic and imagination without skepticism. Awe and fascination infuse everyday experiences during childhood.
Playfulness and Spontaneity: Play is central to childhood. Children engage in spontaneous, imaginative play that promotes creativity, problem-solving skills, and social development. Play allows children to explore their interests, express themselves, and make sense of the world.
Rapid Growth and Development: Childhood is a rapid physical, cognitive, and emotional growth. Children undergo significant milestones, such as walking, talking, and interacting with others. Their developing brains are exceptionally receptive to learning and can absorb large amounts of information.
Imaginative and Creative Thinking: Children have rich imaginations and can creatively think. They engage in make-believe play, storytelling, and artistic expression, enhancing cognitive development and fostering self-expression.
Emotional Intensity and Authenticity: Childhood emotions are intense and authentic. Children express joy, sadness, anger, and excitement openly and without inhibition. Individuals learn to navigate complex emotions and develop emotional awareness through interactions with others through interactions with others.
Formation of Social Skills: Childhood is a critical period for developing social skills and interpersonal relationships. Children learn to cooperate, share, take turns, and resolve peer conflicts. Friendships play a vital role in shaping social development and emotional well-being.
Sense of Security and Trust: A secure and nurturing environment is essential for fostering a sense of security and trust during childhood. Consistent caregiving and positive relationships with adults promote emotional stability and lay the foundation for healthy attachments later in life.
Foundation for Future Development: Childhood experiences influence future development and well-being. The quality of early relationships, educational opportunities, and environmental factors impact lifelong outcomes in areas such as education , health, and social integration.

The Innocent Beginnings

A canvas of innocence unfolds in childhood, painting every experience with wonder and fascination. Here’s a breakdown of the innocent beginnings that characterize this magical phase of life :

Curiosity Unleashed : Childhood begins with an insatiable curiosity about the world; from poking at bugs in the backyard to asking endless “why” questions, children approach the world with wide-eyed wonder, eager to unravel its mysteries. They explore with their senses, touching everything within reach and tasting anything they can get their hands on (much to the dismay of parents).
The Magic of First Words : One of the early childhood milestones is the utterance of those first precious words. Parents eagerly await the day their child says “mama” or “dada,” reveling in the joy of communication blossoming before their eyes.
Innocent Trust : Children possess an innate trust in the goodness of others. They extend a hand to strangers, assuming everyone is a potential friend. This trust lays the foundation for the development of social skills and empathy.
Imagination Takes Flight : A cardboard box transforms into a spaceship, and a blanket draped over a chair becomes a fortress. During childhood, children’s boundless imagination leads them to explore untold adventures in every corner of the household.
Wonderment at Nature : From chasing butterflies to marveling at raindrops, children are captivated by the wonders of nature. Strolling through the park transforms into a treasure hunt for rocks and leaves, nurturing a profound connection with the natural world.
Pure Emotions : Children experience unfiltered and intense emotions in their rawest form. Laughter erupts with uncontrollable giggles, and tears flow freely at the smallest disappointment. Each emotion is a vivid brushstroke on the canvas of their early experiences.

The Playground Chronicles

Ah, the playground is a vibrant arena where children’s imaginations run wild and forge friendships through play. Let’s delve into the playful world of the playground through a series of whimsical chronicles:

The Quest for the Perfect Swing: A group of kids congregates around the swing set, eyeing the coveted seats like treasure. Children engage in spirited negotiation and occasional bargaining (“I’ll trade you my turn for your dessert tomorrow!”) as they test friendships and form alliances.
The Monkey Bar Conquerors: The monkey bars are a formidable challenge for daring souls. Cheers erupt as a determined youngster swings from bar to bar, overcoming fears of falling and earning respect from peers.
Sandcastle Architectures: Over by the sandbox, budding architects craft elaborate sandcastles with moats and turrets. Their faces beam with pride, only to face the inevitable collapse—a valuable lesson in perseverance and impermanence.
Tag, You’re It!: A game of tag ensues, transforming the playground into a lively arena of chase and evasion. Laughter echoes as kids sprint across the rubber ground, their shouts blending with the sounds of swinging swings and clattering slides.
The Quiet Observers: Amid the excitement, a few children choose the sidelines, content to observe and daydream. Lost in their thoughts, they watch the playground drama unfold like a silent movie, occasionally joining in when inspiration strikes.
Friendship Bonds and Fallouts: Friendships bloom and sometimes fray on the playground. Today’s best friends might be tomorrow’s rivals in a game of tetherball, only to reconcile moments later over shared snacks.
The Carefree Spirit of Play: Regardless of background or ability, the playground is a level playing field where laughter and imagination reign supreme. Children revel in the freedom of play, embracing the joy of the moment and forging lasting memories.

School Days

School days encapsulate a whirlwind of experiences that shape a child’s academic, social, and emotional growth. Step into the bustling corridors and lively classrooms to witness the real-life vignettes that define this formative period:

The Morning Rush: School mornings are a flurry of activity as children hastily gather backpacks, lunch boxes, and homework assignments. Parents play the role of timekeepers and motivators, coaxing sleepyheads out of bed and into the rhythm of the day.
Classroom Antics: Inside the classroom, young minds come alive with curiosity and enthusiasm. Teachers become guides on a journey of discovery, imparting knowledge through interactive lessons and engaging activities. There’s always that one classmate whose hand shoots up at every question, eager to impress.
Recess Revelry: Recess is a much-anticipated break from the rigors of academics. The playground transforms into a bustling hub of social interaction—games of tag, soccer matches, and trading cards under the shade of the jungle gym.
Lunchtime Adventures: Lunch hour is a culinary adventure as children unpack homemade lunches or exchange cafeteria fare. The lunch table becomes a forum for sharing stories, trading snacks, and occasionally negotiating coveted items like dessert or chips.
After-School Extracurriculars: The school day extends into after-school activities—sports practices, music lessons, and club meetings. Children explore their interests and talents, forming bonds with peers who share their passions.
Homework Dilemmas: The day winds down with the dreaded homework session. Children tackle math problems, spelling lists, and reading assignments under the watchful eyes of parents. The battle between concentration and distraction unfolds against the backdrop of impending bedtime.
Teacher Heroes and Classroom Tales: Teachers become heroes, imparting knowledge and life lessons. Every classroom has its share of memorable moments—science experiments gone awry, impromptu performances during show-and-tell, and heartfelt celebrations of achievements big and small.

The Perils of Sibling Rivalry

Sibling rivalry is a rite of passage in childhood, a rollercoaster ride of emotions that ultimately contributes to personal growth and familial bonds. Let’s delve into the dynamic world of sibling interactions, where love, competition, and occasional chaos reign supreme:

Territorial Disputes: Siblings stake claim to territories—bedrooms, toys, even imaginary boundaries. The line between “mine” and “yours” is blurry at best, leading to disputes over ownership and the occasional tug-of-war over prized possessions.
The Art of Provocation: Siblings are masters of button-pushing. They know which comments or actions trigger a reaction, leading to epic verbal sparring matches or retaliatory pranks. “Stop copying me!” becomes a battle cry.
Sharing (or Not): Sharing is a virtue, but try telling that to siblings in the heat of the moment. Negotiations over who gets the last cookie or the TV remote resemble high-stakes diplomatic negotiations, complete with alliances and trade-offs.
The Sibling Scoreboard: Every interaction becomes a tally on the invisible scoreboard of sibling rivalry. From academic achievements to athletic prowess, siblings vie for bragging rights and parental recognition, often leading to friendly (or not-so-friendly) competition .
Team Sibling vs. Outsiders: Despite their disputes, siblings unite against external threats—a neighborhood bully or parental intervention. They may bicker incessantly at home but defend each other fiercely in the face of adversity.
Lessons in Conflict Resolution: Sibling rivalry teaches invaluable life skills, including negotiation, compromise, and conflict resolution. Children learn to navigate complex emotions and develop empathy through the give-and-take of sibling interactions.

The Sweet Tooth Chronicles

Childhood is often synonymous with a fondness for all things sweet—a time of eating all desserts and treats with your milk teeth, holding a special place in young hearts and growing taste buds. Let’s embark on a delightful journey through the “Sweet Tooth Chronicles,” exploring the joys, memories, and occasional mischief associated with childhood indulgences:

First Taste of Sweetness: The journey begins with a baby’s first taste of sweetness—perhaps a tiny spoonful of mashed banana or a gentle sip of apple juice. The look of wonder and delight on a child’s face when they experience sweetness for the first time is a precious moment cherished by parents.
Birthday Cake Extravaganzas: Birthdays are synonymous with decadent cakes adorned with colorful frosting and candles. Blowing out candles and diving into a slice of birthday cake is a time-honored tradition that epitomizes childhood celebrations.
Cookie Jar Mysteries: The allure of the cookie jar is irresistible to young explorers. Sneaking a cookie (or two) when no one is looking becomes a thrilling escapade, often accompanied by a mischievous grin and a few crumbs left behind as evidence.
Trick-or-Treat Triumphs: Halloween brings the thrill of trick-or-treating—a quest for sweet treasures in candy-filled loot bags. Costumed children navigate the neighborhood, armed with pillowcases and buckets, trading candy hauls with friends.
After-School Snack Rituals: After-school snacks are a highlight of the day. These treats, from peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to warm chocolate chip cookies, provide comfort and fuel for imaginative play and homework adventures.
Sweet Surprises and Rewards: Sweet treats serve as rewards for accomplishments—be it acing a test, mastering a skill, or displaying acts of kindness . The promise of a special dessert adds an extra layer of motivation and joy to childhood milestones.

Impact of Relationships

The impact of relationships, particularly during childhood and adolescence, is profound and far-reaching, influencing various aspects of personal development and well-being. Let’s explore the significant impacts that relationships can have:

Emotional Development: Relationships play a pivotal role in shaping emotional intelligence. Positive relationships with caregivers and peers allow children to learn empathy , compassion, and effective communication. Healthy attachments foster a sense of security and resilience, while tumultuous relationships can contribute to emotional instability and stress.
Identity Formation: Relationships influence the development of self-concept and identity. The feedback and validation received from others—whether positive or negative—shape how individuals perceive themselves. Supportive relationships that affirm one’s strengths and talents contribute to healthy self-esteem, while toxic relationships can erode self-worth and confidence.
Academic Achievement: The quality of relationships within the educational environment significantly impacts academic performance. Positive teacher-student relationships foster a supportive learning atmosphere, enhancing motivation and engagement. Peer relationships influence academic outcomes, as collaborative learning and peer support can boost achievement.
Behavioral Patterns and Coping Mechanisms: Relationships contribute to forming behavioral patterns and coping strategies. Children model their behaviors based on interactions with significant others, learning adaptive or maladaptive coping mechanisms in response to stress and challenges. Healthy relationships provide a buffer against negative influences and promote adaptive coping skills.
Mental Health and Well-being: Strong familial bonds, nurturing friendships, and supportive social networks contribute to emotional well-being and resilience. On the other hand, social isolation or unhealthy relationships can elevate the likelihood of experiencing depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders.
Life Satisfaction and Happiness: Meaningful relationships are a key determinant of life satisfaction and happiness. Close connections with loved ones provide a sense of belonging and fulfillment. On the other hand, loneliness or strained relationships can contribute to feelings of emptiness and discontentment.

The Bittersweet Goodbye

Childhood is a transformative journey marked by transitions, including the bittersweet moments of saying goodbye to familiar experiences and embarking on new chapters. Here’s a poignant exploration of the emotions and lessons tied to the bittersweet goodbye in childhood:

End of an Era: As children grow, they inevitably outgrow certain aspects of childhood—favorite toys, playground games, or bedtime rituals. Saying goodbye to these cherished elements symbolizes the passage of time and the inevitability of change.
Moving Away or Changing Schools: For many children, farewells involve relocating to a new home or starting at a different school. Saying goodbye to friends, teachers, and familiar surroundings can evoke mixed emotions of excitement for new beginnings and nostalgia for what’s left behind.
Transition to Adolescence: Adolescence signals a shift in priorities and interests. Childhood hobbies and pastimes may give way to new pursuits, and friendships may evolve as individuals navigate personal growth and identity development.
Leaving Childhood Innocence Behind: Growing up involves gaining awareness of the world’s complexities. Children gradually let go of the innocence and naivety of early childhood, facing realities that challenge their perceptions and beliefs.
Parting with Childhood Dreams: As aspirations evolve, individuals may leave behind some childhood dreams in pursuit of more realistic or practical goals. Letting go of specific dreams can be painful but often leads to discovering new passions and ambitions.
Saying Goodbye to Carefree Moments: The carefree nature of childhood—marked by spontaneity, imagination, and boundless energy—gives way to increased responsibilities and expectations. Saying goodbye to carefree moments can remind of youth’s fleeting nature.
Embracing New Beginnings: Every goodbye opens the door to new beginnings. Transitions in childhood provide opportunities for growth, resilience, and adaptation. Embracing change fosters resilience and cultivates essential life skills.
Continuity Amid Change: While farewells mark the end of certain chapters, they also underscore the continuity of personal growth and self-discovery. Each goodbye is a stepping stone in life’s journey, shaping individuals’ resilience and adaptability.

My Memory of Childhood

Every summer, my siblings and I eagerly awaited our escape to Grandma’s house—a haven nestled amidst rolling green fields. Grandma’s warm embrace greeted us as we arrived, her eyes twinkling with joy. Days at Grandma’s unfolded like a storybook. Mornings began with the aroma of Grandma’s pancakes and the cheerful chirping of birds. We explored woods, chased butterflies, and built secret hideouts beneath the old apple tree. We became apprentice gardeners in the garden, learning to tend roses and harvest tomatoes.

Afternoons were for creative play in Grandma’s attic, filled with forgotten treasures. We made our small tent house with a blanket and hosted a house party with my animal toys. Evenings brought shared stories and laughter around the dinner table. Grandma’s kitchen was the heart of the home, where culinary experiments turned into family traditions.

Nights ended on the porch swing, recounting adventures under a blanket of stars. Summer at Grandma’s was a sanctuary of love, laughter, and cherished memories—a timeless refuge that continues illuminating my life journey.

Childhood is a fleeting chapter in life, marked by innocence and wonder. As we grow, the carefree days spent at Grandma’s house become cherished memories that shape who we are. The lessons learned amidst laughter and exploration echo through adulthood, reminding us of simpler times. Yet, as childhood ends, its spirit lives on in our hearts, fueling resilience, creativity, and a deep appreciation for family bonds. Though we bid farewell to those carefree summers, the essence of childhood remains a beacon of joy and nostalgia, guiding us through life’s journey with warmth and gratitude. Childhood’s end marks a beginning, a treasure trove of memories to cherish forever.

Pro Tips for Parents

Here are key actions and approaches that parents can adopt to cultivate strong parent-child relationships during childhood:

Demonstrate unwavering love and support for your child regardless of their actions or achievements.
Encourage open communication and validate your child’s emotions, creating a safe space for them to express themselves without judgment.
Engage in meaningful activities like reading books, playing games, or exploring nature to strengthen the parent-child bond and create lasting memories.
Treat them with kindness, patience, and understanding, demonstrating mutual respect in interactions and decision-making processes.
Encourage your child’s interests, talents, and strengths by providing opportunities for exploration and growth.
Stay adaptable and flexible in your parenting approach, acknowledging that each child possesses unique needs and preferences.
Offer specific praise and recognition for progress and accomplishments, reinforcing a sense of competence and motivation.
Be emotionally available and responsive to your child’s needs, especially during distress or uncertainty.

*Please provide your correct email id. Login details for this Free course will be emailed to you

By signing up, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy .

Valuation, Hadoop, Excel, Web Development & many more.

Forgot Password?

This website or its third-party tools use cookies, which are necessary to its functioning and required to achieve the purposes illustrated in the cookie policy. By closing this banner, scrolling this page, clicking a link or continuing to browse otherwise, you agree to our Privacy Policy

Explore 1000+ varieties of Mock tests View more

Submit Next Question

🚀 Limited Time Offer! - 🎁 ENROLL NOW

LATEST OUTFITS
RECENT FINDS
GUIDES & REVIEWS

MITCH’S POSTS

AMAZON SHOP
GIFT GUIDES

Personal Essay: Childhood Dreams

Couldn’t find very many relevant photos of me as a child for this post, as I write most of my blog posts last-minute and didn’t give my parents ANY time to look for ’em. ;) But here are three from my awkward middle school days! And yes, I made the above car out of a refrigerator box, complete with a parking pass for the train to NYC. One of the biggest accomplishments of my 13 years…

Last week, I launched a new series on the blog: Personal Essays . I did it for a few reasons. First, writing posts that are part of a series has proven to help me stay organized and have fewer late-night blogging sessions. (Oh, I haven’t yet written a post for the ____ series this week. Perfect! Let’s get started on that…) Second, I want to write more deeply on the blog, and these “personal essays” hold me accountable for that. (Being a well-rounded blogger has always been a struggle because I so often fail to see the bigger picture. This helps, though.) Third, writing in longer form is cathartic for me. (Yes, I’m aware of how dorky that probably sounds. But I love writing, and I’ve always used it as a way to peel away from the chaos of everyday life!)

Today’s topic is a bit more lighthearted than last week’s , but I’m thinkin’ that’s a good thing. No need to start the weekend off on a sour note, right?!

Today I’m talking about a few dreams I had as a kid, and how, if at all, they transpired later in life. :) I should, however, preface this with the fact that I was an obsessive kid. Like, if I was into collecting lizards stuffed with sand , I was really into collecting lizards stuffed with sand. Truth: I probably had 45 of them, all purchased with hard-earned money from chores and odd jobs, and all lined up in rows on my shelves. (I wish I had photographic evidence of these little guys, but alas. Still a few rogue lizards laying around my childhood bedroom, though. I’ll be sure to Insta Story them the next time I’m home, haha.)

Anyway … here we go!

Childhood Dreams

Again, a totally irrelevant photo. But here I am with my first dog, Patch. And there Patch is to the right as a puppy, so you can actually see his face. ;)

Become an Olympic gymnast

It all started with my aunts. They were gymnasts, and I loved their stories. And then I found this book about Olga Korbut in my elementary school library, and I fell in love with everything about gymnastics. My dad even built me a balance beam and set up a trampoline in the backyard so I could practice at home. I distinctly remember watching the 1996 Olympic Games on vacation in Ocean City and ugly crying as the Magnificent Seven were awarded their gold medals. I saved every newspaper clipping and pasted it into my scrapbook; I attended the “Tour of Champions” after the Games ended. (Where I met Dominique Moceanu and Shannon Miller, and got Shannon Miller’s autograph! Almost died of happiness.) In short, I was obsessed .

How that transpired

It didn’t, haha. I wasn’t any good, and I only really liked the floor exercise and playing on the Tumble Trak and trampoline. I remember at one point, after learning how to do a “kip” on the bars, being like, “… and that’s that .” (Side note: how adorable are those British girls?! The cutest!) Just wasn’t into it, and yikes: there was no freakin’ way I was agreeing to do what came next. I mean, why was no one else concerned about the fact that we could DIE doing that stuff?!

(I suppose the one cool thing that came from it is I can still do a back handspring and back flip on the trampoline, which, at my age… is kind of something? Or maybe not, considering it’s the only athletic thing I can do at this point, and it’s not like I currently have a trampoline in my backyard. Lord help me at yoga this weekend with my friends. Should be pretty hilarious! But oh my gosh: Did I ever tell you the time Mitch jumped THROUGH my childhood trampoline? My dad high-fived him, but I was devastated.)

There was a silver lining to my non-existent gymnastics story, though. My three cousins–Mackenzie, Brenna and Olivia–became superstar gymnasts, and they competed for years and years and years, which was so much fun. I loved following along with their careers, and loved watching and rooting for them. Olivia is actually still competing! She’s the captain of the William & Mary gymnastics team this year, and she’s incredible. You can watch her here . I KNOW! Insane! My sister-in-law, Kim , was also a superstar gymnast back in the day, so it’s really nice to be able to freak out over competitions together. ;)

Oh! And this is really cute: Mitch is super into technology, and he has our television set up to record every single gymnastics program that’s aired. So THAT’S awesome. Emma also realized how important it was for me to be able to watch the 2016 Olympic Games; she arrived a week beforehand so I could watch them at home while recovering! Such a sweetie pie. ;) She wore this . Note the gymnasts. And how tiny she is!

Become a Broadway actress/singer

Okay, really I should say that I just wanted to be Little Orphan Annie. Again, obsessed with that musical, and my childhood best friend and I must have put on a zillion “shows” of our own for our poor parents and neighbors. I’d spend hours in my basement trying to sound just like Andrea McArdle… or Aileen Quinn, who, coincidentally, is from Yardley, where my parents moved us when I was in high school. (Part of the reason I didn’t put up a fight when they told me we were moving.) Guys, I was Little Orphan Annie for Halloween one year. I wore a clown wig, because where else do you get a curly red wig?

Not at ALL. While I briefly took some acting and singing classes for a couple of summers, I was much too shy and nervous to actually speak up or sing. I did get to be Annie during a talent show once, and I almost sang “Tomorrow” during an audition in middle school… but then completely chickened out and sang “Do Re Mi” very softly instead. I’m sure you can imagine how that turned out. Ended up being cast as a munchkin in the Wizard of Oz, haha. Later in life, though, I got pretty into country music, and I learned how to (poorly) play a bit of guitar. I still play from time to time, and Emma and I have such a blast with it. It makes me happy, even though I’m not very good. ;)

Become an author

I vividly remember the day when I realized I loved the written word. I was in the first grade, living on Long Island, attending Saint Agnes . The library had just received “Samantha Saves the Day,” and I couldn’t get over how incredible the author, Valerie Tripp, was. Every word spoke to me, and I had to have that book. So I sat down with it and proceeded to copy as many pages as I could. I got to page five, became overwhelmed, and started crying. The teacher had to hug me to stop my tears. It was really embarrassing.

In the years that followed, I created my own printing press in my basement. Instead of copying already published books, though, I “published” my own, using composition notebooks, construction paper and a whole lot of Elmer’s Glue. Most of the books lacked endings, as I loved starting stories but found great difficulty in finishing them. But they were all lined up in a row on a shelf, just like those lizards. One day, I promised myself, I’d actually publish a novel.

While I never published a novel, I did end up working in the editorial field for a few years. In college, I was the news editor for Fairfield University’s student newspaper, and then I interned and semi-worked at the Hartford Courant. (One of the happiest days of my life was finding my story–about a woman who had a real stuffed elephant in her house–on the front page, albeit in the Sunday edition, of the paper. Literally cried. I’ll never forget that elephant.) After that, I was an online news editor for Nielsen, and then I taught eighth grade English in the New York City Department of Education for a few years. (They even let me teach journalism for a couple of semesters!) Now I do this weird blogging thing on the internet, but it’s low-key and it does allow me to write on a daily basis. Do I miss reporting? Yes, but it was a tough lifestyle to uphold. It’s also nice not having to report on murders on a daily basis. ;) Here at Kellyinthecity.com, things are a bit more lax, and no one really cares if my exhausted self makes a few mistakes or breaks out of AP Style. (Thanks, guys!) And we rarely talk or think about murder. (Though there was that Sophie incident…) Oh! And I can self-publish without Elmer’s Glue.

So that’s something.

What were your childhood dreams? Tell me you collected lizards, too.

You'll Also Love

Subscribe & Follow

Subscribe to the newsletter.

Daily Updates
Weekly Updates

Let's be Friends

About Project
Testimonials

Business Management Ideas

Essay on My Dream

List of essays on my dream in english, essay on my dream – essay 1 (100 words), essay on my dream – essay 2 (250 words), essay on my dream to become a soldier – essay 3 (300 words), essay on my dream and fears – essay 4 (300 words), essay on my dream life – essay 5 (400 words), essay on my dream to become a doctor – essay 6 (400 words), essay on my dream – essay 7 (750 words), essay on my dream – essay 8 (1000 words).

Every night I dream of living a life of a celebrity. In my dream I see myself dressed up like a model posing for cameras. It is my dream to work in the film industry and become famous. But, for that, I will have to work really hard. My mother always tells me to concentrate on studies and live up to the dream of becoming a model. My father also supports me and he says that he believes in me. Once he told me that I should help others and be in good books of the people to win their heart as it will help me make my dream come true.

Every day I like to take some time aside from my responsibilities to think about my dreams and all the goals I want to achieve. My dream is to become a successful businessman. Business is something that has always intrigued me. As my father is a businessman, since childhood, I had this keen interest to be a part of or to lead a business.

Only having a dream won’t help, I also need to work towards the achievement of my dream. As doing business is not as easy as it seems, first I need to understand the basics of what business actually is. This will the first step towards my dream. So after completing my intermediary, I have enrolled myself in a reputed college to do my Bachelors in Business Administration (BBA). After completing BBA, I will also do my Masters in Business Administration. By then I will have gained the complete knowledge on business and its functioning which will help me reach my dream.

Apart from the theoretical part, I can always count on my father to share with me the practical experiences and advices that will help me shape my dream. This will take me closer to my dream of becoming a successful businessman. I have also started reading magazines about successful businessmen and their success stories in order to gain some idea that will help me in the long. I will put the best of my efforts and work hard towards achieving my dream.

Introduction:

My dream to become a Soldier started on an Army Day (January 15th), when I was still in High School. I witnessed the tribute paid to martyred soldiers at the Amar Jawan Jyoti in India Gate. It was followed by parades displaying Tanks, Missiles, and War Helicopters etc. The impression I received that day motivates me to realise my dream to become a Soldier.

Love of a Soldier:

The history of Indian independence and the life of freedom fighters has always fascinated me. Those who were responsible for the air of freedom we breathe today, loved our motherland and dedicated their lives to its well-being. These seeds in me have developed a sense of love for the country. It has also nurtured my dream to become a soldier and safeguard it.

Spirit of a Soldier:

Apart from academics, I started to collect all details about how to realise my dream to become a Soldier. I began to understand the values that inspire a Soldier to willingly face challenges and responsibly safeguard the nation even at the cost of his own life. This inspired me to study well and keep myself fit to achieve my dream to become a Soldier.

Training of a Soldier:

I also understood about the training before service. The feeling of pride and mutual loyalty is imbibed among the trainees. They are also trained to willing sacrifice for the country’s honour, with a do or die spirit. A sense of fearlessness, fairness and honesty are inculcated during the disciplined training. These components further kindled my dream to become a Soldier.

Lifestyle of a Soldier:

On the one hand, the soldier’s life is a life of self-sacrifice. On the other hand, the lifestyle it offers far exceeds my expectation, and fuels my dream to become a Soldier. Opportunities to advance in ranks, paid study holidays, subsidized housing, free medical coverage and recreational facilities are provided, apart from regular salary and perks. Lifelong pension is awarded after retirement.

Conclusion:

Many young people in the country offer the time of their life to work for big Corporates. But, I am here to pursue my dream to become a Soldier and dedicate my life to the welfare of the nation. I often encourage my friends to follow my dream to become a Soldier, at least for a short service tenure ranging from 10 to 14 years.

At a very early age, my dream was to do something big in life. But along with that I still had some fears also. I want to have a successful career, and for this, I had set an aim. It is quite essential for everybody to get them to establish professionally and successfully. Besides this, few other dreams are also necessary for me like health, relationships, and many different aspects of life. However, I also fear to get fail in achieving all these targets.

Career Dream and Fear:

When I was a kid, my dream was to become a doctor. But during my growing age, the Bollywood industry fascinated me and then my dream of becoming doctor changed to an actor. When I passed my class 12 th , the only goal that hit my mind was becoming an engineer. I always fear of dreaming about big things, but if you have potential then, you can achieve anything in life.

Dream and Fear of Health and Fitness:

When I was young, I was not so much concerned about my health. But now I realized the importance of having good health. My dream of becoming fit and healthy was only achieved due to strong willpower and eagerness of doing regular exercise. With this thought, I managed to lose around 15 kg easily. Now, I don’t fear about eating any food as I compensate that with my daily workout.

Dreams and fear about the relationship:

There is a special place of relationships in my life, and sometimes I fear about losing the important people in my life. But, now I realize that instead of thinking negative, we should try to spend more time with the people. It is as essential as my dream of good career.

Thinking only about the career and success with the little amount of fear might not offer you complete happiness later. It is good to become serious about your career, but you should also try to overcome any fear for a more successful life ahead.

Life is a dynamic process that has its ups and downs. Juggling the disparities of life can be very stressful at times and that is why you get your mind wondering in thoughts. Most thoughts are usually based on what people desire, which we call the dream life. The desires in life may not always be achieved but it is good to have a picture or at least an idea of the kind of life on desires to have. In America, people have the American dream but you as an individual should ask yourself; what is your dream life?

How my dream life looks like:

Socially, I have always imagined myself being a very influential person in my society. Currently in school, I always have the urge to influence someone but I still lack the confidence and resources to do so. I have always wanted to travel the world and explore different cultures of the world through interactions with people. I also imagine of having a great family with whom I can travel the world with.

Career-wise, I want to work at the comfort of my own home and be flexible so that I can always have time for my family. Spiritually, I have a desire to always be in good terms with God and follow the doctrines of my religion.

Economically, I want to be self-actualized at an early age so that I can focus on my influential personality, having all the resources I need. I want to be satisfied with what I will have achieved and work on living a happy life.

How I plan on living my dream life?

Living the dream life can begin any time that you chose to be as an individual. For my dream life, the things that I can achieve while still at school is the ability to have a spiritual wellness and flowing the doctrines of my religion. I can also start learning to appreciate whatever I have and living a happy life.

For the desires that I cannot achieve at the moment, I will work towards achieving them by shaping and redirecting the pathway. For example, my career, I will pursue something in the university that will allow me to work from home without necessarily going to work.

A dream life is basically the desired of one’s heart inform of an imagination. A dream life does not affect the reality in any way.

A dream is something that helps you to mold your future and aim your life to an appropriate goal. Dreaming big will help us to work for it harder and finally achieve it. Without desire and aim in life, we cannot focus and work hard to fulfill our dream.

My Dream to become a Doctor:

The biggest dream of my life is to become a doctor. I have seen many doctors, who save other people’s lives and they feel happy in the satisfaction they get through this activity. I want to be a doctor, who will serve good for this society and help poor to get good medical care without expecting big money in return.

Doctors are respected in all places and among all types of society. In spite of being different in many things like wealth, religion, etc., everyone will be in need of the best doctor to treat them honestly. I dream of being one such doctor to whom anyone can come without any doubt and fear of being tricked.

I don’t want to be a doctor who just works for money. I want to help others who can’t afford big budget treatments and choose their fate due to their lack of money. When a person is cured of their illness, the smile that appears on their face will be the greatest reward I will ever get. My dream is to become a doctor, who is praised for the kindness and get rewards through others blessings.

How to become a Doctor?

To get the admissions in a medical seat is not that easy. But I will work hard and crack the competitive exam to get a merit seat in the college. I will work hard from the beginning to end to improve my knowledge and keep updated about every upcoming and ongoing development.

I would like to choose the specialization when I can actually decide which one will suit my desire. I have an aim to serve the people in their needs and once I grow big enough to decide the correct career to fulfill my dream, I will work harder to achieve that as well.

After achieving My Dream:

Once I complete my whole medical courses I would be looking to practice in a well-reputed hospital to perfect my job. With this perfection I will start my own clinic and serve people for the rest of my life along with this I will help other students also to get trained to become a good doctor. I will make sure that my dream will come true at the best time.

We all have some sort of ambition or dream. My dream is to become a world class chef. Dreams play a very important role in moulding our future. There is a saying that “if you can imagine it, you can achieve it; if you can dream it, you can become it”. This saying implies that if you can work hard and put in your best to achieving your dream, it is very possible to live your dream. Working hard to achieve ones dream is easier said than done but if you put in your best effort and never give up, dreams are achievable.

In the path of achieving my dream, it is important that I take one step at a time. Even if I have a very big dream of becoming a word class chef, it is best for me to take steady and small steps by setting both long term and short term goals, by doing this, I am always working towards achieving my dream. When I take one step at a time, it helps not to rush into decisions and take things easy.

I know becoming a world class chef is not very easy and can only happen if complete and proper training from a very reputable institute and there isn’t much I can do at the moment to speed up the realisation of my dream since I am still in school. However, I still do my best to set my dream rolling, I follow a lot of cooking websites and blogs, watch cooking shows, read culinary books and I practice my cooking to sharpen my skills every time. These are all little steps I am taking towards achieving my dream. Though my goal is to become a world class chef, I have small goals in place for each month and year to come so that I can reach my dream.

A major hindrance to achieving my set goals and my dream is the lack of inadequacy of motivation. A lot of people have given up their goals and dreams just because they got tired on the way. It is extremely important to remain motivated and only stop is when the dream has been achieved. Highlighted below are some useful tips that I have used to keep myself motivated on the journey to reaching my dream:

i. Anytime I see that I am running out of drive and energy and I am becoming too tired to stick to my set goals, I try to remind myself of what my dream is and the feeling of pride and joy I will experience when I achieve it and become a world class chef. It feels like pressing a reset button and starting with a refreshed mind again and working harder towards achieving my dream.

ii. Long term goals and short term goals are set towards the ultimate goal of achieving my dream and as I reach these short term goals, I try to reward myself for my achievement. The reward can vary from eating dinner at my favourite restaurant or buying myself a new phone I wanted or going out with my friends. Rewarding myself is a very good way to remain motivated towards the achievements of my goals and ultimately my dream.

iii. When I work too much and have no time to relax and play, my productivity drops and I become dull. Therefore, it is a good idea to have some time for myself away from work to focus on something fun that I love. I find time in my schedule every day to engage in some form of leisure activity or sport.

iv. Having people who believes in my dream and support my goals around me makes all the difference. Having positive people helps me find the strength and courage to push on and not give up on my dream. They motivate me to work hard and do the best to achieve my goals and my dream.

v. A mistake is nothing more than an experience and an opportunity to try again and do things much better. So, instead of getting heartbroken and disheartened to the point of wanting to give up on my goals and dream when I face a tough time or make mistakes, I learn from the mistakes and move on as the tough times and mistakes make me a lot stronger.

I will keep working hard towards achieving my dream and I believe that I will become a world class chef one day.

Who in this world does not have a dream? A dream to buy a car, a dream to be a scientist, a dream to do something for the society, or just a dream to live a life with contentment. Something or the other, but surely every person has a dream. It is this dream that drives you to work hard, achieve your milestones and ride towards success in your life. Success need not be becoming the wealthiest person on the earth. Achieving even your smallest dream can be a huge success for you. Since childhood, you come across various fields which often you think of as your ultimate targets. However, most of them are just fantasies and fade away with time. Still, there are some things which just stick on to your minds and these very things eventually go on to be your dreams.

My Dream – My Passion:

Like others, even I have a dream. My dream is to join the intelligence unit of the country and serve my country with pride. Usually, in order to serve the country, people think of joining the armed forces. However, I have a different point of view. I dream to join the intelligence unit and provide inputs to these armed forces so that they can protect the country in a good way and not many lives are lost fight battles with our neighbours.

Where did it all start?

Since my childhood, I have been fascinated by the role of intelligence and the methods of work they are used to. I had got a chance to be with a couple of people early in my life who were in the same field and it is from here that I got so much stuck up with this profession that I have dreamt day and night to be a part of this elite team. Moreover, I feel that I have it in me to research about things as well as people and am known in my circles to extract information from nowhere. I feel that this talent of mine can prove helpful for the country as well. Intelligence plays a crucial role in the security establishment of the country. The inputs gathered from intelligence units help the government and the forces to plan their steps both at diplomatic and at the level of securing the borders.

Another thing which excites me about this dream is that it is not a conventional field such as common occupations which are sought after by most of the youth of our country. Another very important thing to mention here that you need not formally join the intelligence to realise this dream. By keeping a check on your surroundings and providing proper information to the police in case you notice an unfavourable incident is also a form of your contribution to the security agencies of the country. If everyone remains active, a lot many incidents such as terrorist attacks can be averted.

Why having a dream is so important?

Dreams are very important for everyone. Without dreams, there will be no desire to pursue. There will be no objective to reach. We will all be nothing without dreams. Not having dreams resembles pursuing a traceless homicide. It resembles following an undetectable shadow. It is a loathsome goose pursue. We should comprehend what we need to do and pursue that desire.

A great many people have dreams. Successful ones or little ones. Indeed, even the best individuals had dreams and that is the thing that has made them what they are today. Envisioning is basic for a person. Without dreams, you will lose enthusiasm forever lastly prefer not to live. You will be exhausted and tired of the equivalent dull schedules of your everyday life and won’t discover an enthusiasm for the most energizing things. Just with dreams, will you discover a reason to carry on with your life? You will begin buckling down towards the fantasy and will never lose enthusiasm forever. You will never tire and dependably be spurred. This is the most ideal approach to end up effective. So, dream and dream big. It is the only way to achieve contentment in life.

Be that as it may, with dreams, comes extraordinary duty. It is not just sufficient to dream and disregard that fantasy. Numerous individuals dream, however just some wake up and work for it.

It is basic to buckle down for your fantasies. Without this diligent work, a fantasy will just remain a craving in the subliminal personality and will never be accomplished.

On the off chance that you don’t have a fantasy, you can never appreciate the extravagances of life or all that life brings to the table. You will never feel that delighted sentiment of accomplishment. You will never get pride in what you do and what you have accomplished. Every one of these things is vital for people and without these emotions, there is no inspiration.

In the event that you don’t have inspiration, you will be a disappointment throughout everyday life. You won’t have the capacity to accomplish those objectives and will have a hopeless existence. You will never appreciate the extravagances of life and you will never feel glad. You will be a disappointment and you will be nothing throughout everyday life. We should go that additional mile to achieve our objectives. Disappointments may come, however a state of mind to continue proceeding onward and attempting to enhance is completely accomplished by dreams. Dreams are the fuel that continues invigorating you to go further. Regardless of whether there are numerous snags throughout everyday life, you will, in general, continue moving further and attempting to be superior to anything your identity. Consistent and endless enhancement is extremely imperative in advancing throughout everyday life. It improves your identity and furthermore whatever you need to advance in. It causes you to gain from your missteps

Only having career objectives and succeeding professionally can disregard you after one point throughout everyday life. Work as constantly to accomplish these as you do to understand your ultimate dreams. Having a dream is not important. What is important is striving continuously to achieving it. The sense of satisfaction you acquire once you have attained your goals cannot be explained in words and has no alternative in life. So, strive hard and live your dreams. Who knows, what is there in store for you?

Ambition , Doctor , Dreams , Goal , My Dream , Soldier

Get FREE Work-at-Home Job Leads Delivered Weekly!

Join more than 50,000 subscribers receiving regular updates! Plus, get a FREE copy of How to Make Money Blogging!

Message from Sophia!

Like this post? Don’t forget to share it!

Here are a few recommended articles for you to read next:

Essay on Success
Essay on My School
Essay on Solar Energy
Essay on Christmas

No comments yet.

Leave a reply click here to cancel reply..

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Billionaires

Donald Trump
Warren Buffett
Email Address
Free Stock Photos
Keyword Research Tools
URL Shortener Tools
WordPress Theme

Book Summaries

How To Win Friends
Rich Dad Poor Dad
The Code of the Extraordinary Mind
The Luck Factor
The Millionaire Fastlane
The ONE Thing
Think and Grow Rich
100 Million Dollar Business
Business Ideas

Digital Marketing

Mobile Addiction
Social Media Addiction
Computer Addiction
Drug Addiction
Internet Addiction
TV Addiction
Healthy Habits
Morning Rituals
Wake up Early
Cholesterol
Reducing Cholesterol
Fat Loss Diet Plan
Reducing Hair Fall
Sleep Apnea
Weight Loss

Internet Marketing

Email Marketing

Law of Attraction

Subconscious Mind
Vision Board
Visualization

Law of Vibration

Professional Life

Motivational Speakers

Bob Proctor
Robert Kiyosaki
Vivek Bindra
Inner Peace

Productivity

Not To-do List
Project Management Software
Negative Energies

Relationship

Getting Back Your Ex

Self-help 21 and 14 Days Course

Self-improvement.

Body Language
Complainers
Emotional Intelligence
Personality

Social Media

Project Management
Anik Singal
Baba Ramdev
Dwayne Johnson
Jackie Chan
Leonardo DiCaprio
Narendra Modi
Nikola Tesla
Sachin Tendulkar
Sandeep Maheshwari
Shaqir Hussyin

Website Development

Wisdom post, worlds most.

Expensive Cars

Our Portals: Gulf Canada USA Italy Gulf UK

Privacy Overview

Cookie	Duration	Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional	11 months	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy	11 months	The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.

More From Forbes

How to rekindle your childhood dreams when making a career change.

Share to Facebook
Share to Twitter
Share to Linkedin

One of the questions in my career change assessment is about childhood dreams. What were yours? I wanted to be a journalist and was also interested in law. I remember taking modules on career theories and writing a few essays in my graduate learning. According to Super's Developmental Self-Concept Theory, from birth to mid-teens, major developmental tasks are developing self-concept and moving from play to work orientation. Seligman, a positive theory psychologist, believes the main aim of career counseling is reaching the point at which we have clear, accurate self-images and are involved in the exploration of ourselves and the world of work.

People who adore their work take time to develop self-awareness, gain clarity and create space to make intentional steps, but they're not extra special and what they have isn't elusive. Why entertain crippling thoughts?

There is hope for you in your career, and that's why the findings below caught my eye. In a 2020 survey taken by 2,000 Americans, respondents were asked to examine their childhood career dreams. The research was conducted by Zety, a résumé builder.

67% of respondents stated they were not able to achieve their childhood vision of their dream jobs.
58% say they still wish they could achieve their dream jobs.
While some say their childhood dreams developed over time, the most popular response was that they "became more realistic."

Top 10 childhood dreams for men

Professional athlete
Police officer
Business owner
Firefighter

See A Total Eclipse Of A Star As Manhattanhenge Returns The Night Sky This Week

Wwe raw results winners and grades as bron breakker destroys ricochet, work-from-home levels reach lowest since 2020—but remote work still dominates these industries.

Top 10 childhood dreams for women

Veterinarian
Fashion Designer

Here's what I'd suggest if you're yearning to weave your former dreams into your career path:

Ask yourself:

Was there a human influence that lead you to desire a path? I talk more about career influences' and their impact in this column . While people can be a great support, your loved ones often have their own biases and ideals for your life. It's important to distinguish where your career goals originate.
Does the job function align with your current values, and are you even clear on your values?
Do you have the energy to take time out from your current job to reignite your dream? With accountability and a sound strategy, you could perhaps pursue writing, taking a short course, teaching a class, starting a side-business or getting involved in a meaningful project. LinkedIn ProFinder, Upwork, and Fiverr are three varied freelancing platforms if you wish to explore paid gig work.

Reflect on:

What caused you to walk away from your childhood dream? This is likely a key influence or value, and if you're not aware, there's no telling that it won't influence you again in the future.
The fact that our careers are a journey. The world of work has changed, and you're not in a box. Occupations are incredibly vast, and for each of these childhood occupations, there are hundreds of different roles within. Being a writer, teacher or business person looks and feels very different depending on the industry and company.
The concept that a fulfilling job consists of these three things: an aligned job function, industry and company.

Remember, people who see success with their career changes take the time to reflect and develop self-awareness. If you're sitting on your childhood dreams wishing you could do something about it, you actually can.

Rachel Montanez is a holistic career change coach. Take her career clarity quiz and unlock your career change model.

Editorial Standards
Reprints & Permissions

We use cookies to enhance our website for you. Proceed if you agree to this policy or learn more about it.

Essay Database >
Essays Examples >
Essay Topics

Essays on Childhood Dreams

3 samples on this topic

To many college goers, crafting Childhood Dreams papers comes easy; others require the help of various kinds. The WowEssays.com database includes expertly crafted sample essays on Childhood Dreams and relevant issues. Most definitely, among all those Childhood Dreams essay examples, you will find a paper that resonates with what you perceive as a worthy paper. You can be sure that literally every Childhood Dreams item presented here can be used as a bright example to follow in terms of overall structure and writing different chapters of a paper – introduction, main body, or conclusion.

If, however, you have a hard time coming up with a solid Childhood Dreams essay or don't have even a minute of extra time to browse our sample directory, our free essay writer company can still be of great assistance to you. The thing is, our writers can craft a model Childhood Dreams paper to your individual needs and specific requirements within the defined period. Buy college essays today!

Real Women Have Curves Movie Review Sample

Intersectionalities

Specific Purpose: To Inform The Audience About My Two Biggest Dreams In Life That I Had In My Childhood. Essay Template For Faster Writing

Speech on Childhood Dreams

I would rap, would tap! I would cook, it would be a hook!

Central Idea: As I was growing up, I wanted to a rapper as I was mad about music and songs; I imagined myself to be this famous rap artist who is lauded all over the world. I also wanted to be a chef. I love food and I would imagine cooking great cuisines and being famous for that.

Introduction

You're viewing this site as a domestic an international student

You're an international student if you are:

intending to study on a student visa
not a citizen of Australia or New Zealand
not an Australian permanent resident
not a holder of an Australian humanitarian visa.

You're a domestic student if you are:

a citizen of Australia or New Zealand
an Australian permanent resident
a holder of an Australian humanitarian visa.
Alumni & Giving
Current students

Search Charles Darwin University

Student stories

How I'm pursuing my childhood dream of becoming a teacher

We all have that one teacher who stays with us for life. You remember their lessons and support like it was yesterday. And now that you're all grown up, you want to be just like them.

When Kelsey started studying teaching, she was in the same shoes. Read on to see how she studied her Bachelor of Education (Primary Teaching) online to become a Year 1 teacher in her home town in regional South Australia.

What motivated you to study teaching?

Becoming a primary school teacher has been a dream career since I was young. I give credit to my school teachers for inspiring me, because I was motivated by their strong guidance, leadership and compassion. I knew that I wanted to do the same thing when I grew up.

I credit my school teachers for inspiring me to become a teacher.

What were the biggest challenges you faced while studying?

With my busy schedule, I sometimes lacked motivation. I'd often come home from working three jobs, playing sport or catching up with family with no desire to turn on the computer and study.

Lecturers and peers in the same position got me through these days. As an online student, I often turned to them via email or online discussion boards to get going again. Speaking to friends or family also really helped when it got too overwhelming.

I needed the flexibility. I loved that I could study teaching online.

Why did you choose CDU?

I needed the flexibility! I loved that I could study my teaching degree online and fit it in with my busy work and sport schedule.

I did my lecture- and tutorial-based units online and then worked with CDU and local schools to arrange my teaching placements close to home. All of my placements were in my town, which was both convenient and a good opportunity to network.

What was the highlight of your teaching degree at CDU?

Teaching is a full-time job and it doesn't stop just because the bell rings at the end of the day. The opportunity to experience four practical placements prepared me to be ready for this level of commitment. I knew right after my first prac that I was in the right career. I loved what I was doing and knew it was all going to be worth it.

All of my placements were close to home, which was both convenient and a good opportunity to network.

What's your advice to others considering a teaching degree?

You need to be time efficient, determined to study and be surrounded by a great support network of fellow students, friends and family.

What do you think it takes to be a great teacher?

My aim is to make the classroom and learning journey as inspiring, creative and fun as possible. I want to put all the love and compassion I was given as a primary school student into the kids of the future. I want them to grow up ready to follow whatever career path they choose with the ultimate success.

Ready to become a teacher? Study Teaching at CDU to find your new world, your way. Choose to study online, on campus, part time or full time.

Share this article

Explore 300+ courses, related articles.

Maddy found her calling on the ski slopes of Japan

Sometimes career inspiration strikes in the unlikeliest of places. After a couple of false starts at uni, it was finding a job as a ski instructor that encouraged Maddy move to the tropics to become a primary school teacher.

Axel's connecting kids with the fun side of science

Axel knows first-hand the impact a great teacher can have on your future. He was inspired by many of his own high school teachers to pursue a career in education. Not only is Axel now forging a career as a chemistry teacher in his hometown of Darwin, but he’s also sharing his passion for STEM with the rest of the planet.

Breanna felt the call of teaching pull her back to the Territory

Darwin local Breanna wanted a taste of the big, wide world outside once she left school, but the laidback Territory lifestyle soon called her back home. With a new career plan and a scholarship or two under her belt, postgraduate teaching student Breanna can’t wait to make a positive impact on high school students in her hometown.

Cookie compliance notice

We use cookies to improve our service. By continuing you agree to our privacy statement . EU/EA members can update your cookie settings here .

Sign up for the Health News Florida newsletter

7 surprising facts about dreams: why we have them and what they mean.

An abstract 3d cloud model in the bedroom. (3d render)

Dreaming is often misunderstood. But in a new book, a neuroscientist argues that it’s one of the most vital functions of the human brain, and just about anyone can tap into dreams’ insights.

I had a nightmare last night.

It began like many of my dreams do – I was on vacation with my extended family. This time, we were in Australia, visiting family friends in a big house. Things took a turn when — in some way that I can’t quite explain — I got mixed up in this Australian family’s jewelry theft and smuggling operation. And I lied about it in front of my relatives, to protect myself and my co-conspirators. Before I woke up, I was terrified I’d be sent to prison.

The dream seems bizarre, but when I pick the narrative apart, there are clear connections to my waking life. For instance, I recently listened to a podcast where a pair of fancy hairpins suspiciously go missing during a family gathering. Moreover, I’m moving tomorrow and still have packing to do. When the movers arrive in the morning, if I haven't finished packing, I'll face the consequences of my lack of preparedness – a crime, at least to my subconscious.

This story also appears in the June 2 issue of the NPR Health newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Dr. Rahul Jandial, neurosurgeon, neuroscientist and author of This is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life , says the major themes and images of vivid dreams like these are worth paying attention to, and trying to derive meaning from. (For me, I decided that the next time I have to move, I’m taking the day before off!)

I spoke with Dr. Jandial about what else we can learn from our dreams, including some of modern science’s most remarkable findings, and theories, about the dreaming brain.

1. Dreams are not random

From dream diaries recorded in ancient Egypt and China to reports from anthropologists in the Amazon, to surveys of modern Americans, evidence shows our dreams have a lot in common. For example, being chased and falling are pretty consistent.

“Reports of nightmares and erotic dreams are nearly universal,” Jandial says, while people rarely report dreaming about math. Jandial says the lack of math makes sense because the part of your brain primarily responsible for logic — the prefrontal cortex — is typically not involved in dreaming.

2. Our brains are super active when we dream

Jandial learned something fundamental about dreams in the midst of performing brain surgery.

It was awake surgery – he’d numbed the scalp and partially opened the skull. (The brain does not feel pain). Jandial was operating on the left temporal lobe, where language is typically located. Working carefully to avoid damage, he went millimeter by millimeter, stimulating the neurons, and asking the patient to count to ten at each spot.

But after one such zap of electricity, Jandial’s patient experienced a nightmare that had recurred for him since childhood.

Research has since confirmed that nightmares, and all dreams, arise from brain activity. “Now we know from different measurements of electricity and metabolic usage, the sleeping-dreaming brain is burning hot. It's sparking with electricity. We might be asleep, but the brain is on fire,” Jandial says.

3. When you first wake up, or while you're drifting off, is fertile time for creativity

Salvador Dali had a method for capturing his thoughts just as he was falling asleep, which Jandial recounts in This is Why You Dream . The artist would sit in a chair holding a large key above a plate on the floor. When he nodded off, the key would drop on the plate and wake him up. Then he’d sketch what he remembered from the last few moments of sleep – an inspiration for his surrealist paintings. Brain imaging studies support the potential of sleep-entry as a moment of insight, says Jandial.

Fortunately for those of us who prefer to fall asleep and stay there, thank you very much, you can also get inspiration from your dreams when you first wake up. “I get all my ideas when I wake slowly,” Jandial says. He writes down what he remembers in the first few minutes after waking, before checking the news or Instagram. It’s not all great stuff, “But when there are good ideas, it's from that time. It's not from two o'clock with my espresso,” he says.

4. Nightmares? Write a new script

Jandial says nightmares around occasional stressful events, like my dream about the jewelry heist – are usually not cause for concern. But if you’re stuck in a loop of recurring fearful dreams, there is something you can try: Imagery Rehearsal Therapy.

This is something you can do with a therapist. “If [a patient has] a recurrent nightmare of an explosion or an airplane crashing, they'll go to the therapist to draw out the map of the dream, the dreamscape, if you will, and then they'll rehearse that the airplane landed safely,” or that they arrived home from a drive instead of crashing, Jandial explains. After time, he says many patients see their nightmares change.

5. Dreams about cheating are normal. They don’t mean there's something wrong with your relationship

In surveys, a majority of people report erotic dreams. And for people in relationships, these dreams contain “high rates of infidelity, whether people report being in healthy relationships or unhealthy relationships,” Jandial says.

But sexy dreams have rules too. “When you look at the pattern of erotic dreams, the acts seem to be wild, but the characters are surprisingly narrow. Celebrities, even family members, repellent bosses; it's a small collection of people as a pattern.” Jandial and others theorize that having sexual dreams about people familiar to us may be a feature our brains evolved to keep us open to procreation and increase the likelihood of the species’ survival.

6. Near the end of life, dreams can provide comfort

Treating patients at City of Hope cancer center in Los Angeles, Jandial observes a phenomenon he calls “dreams to the rescue.” For some patients near the end of their lives, “even though the day is filled with struggle, the dreams are of reconciliation, of hope, of positive emotions. I was surprised to find that end-of-life dreams are a common thing, and they lean positive.”

Jandial says there’s evidence that death may come with one final dream. “Once the heart stops, with the last gush of blood up the carotid [artery] to the brain, the brain's electricity explodes in the minute or two after cardiac death…Those patterns look like expansive electrical brainwave patterns of dreaming and memory recall,” Jandial says.

7. Dreams can be ‘a portal to your inner self’ — and mental health

Everyone has anxiety dreams from time to time. Some are literal, like dreaming you’re on a podium naked when you actually have to give a speech the next day, says Jandial. But others can be more symbolic, and these are worth tuning in to.

Jandial remembers one he had during the pandemic. In waking life, he’d just learned to sail. In the dream he was sailing a boat and, “there was a massive waterfall,” he recounts. “And I was sailing horizontally and I had to constantly keep the helm, or the wheel, up-river just to go straight and not fall off.”

He interprets it as his brain’s way of helping him process a difficult time. He was raising teenagers and working as a cancer surgeon amid COVID fears. “There were wars on many fronts for me at that time. And what I walked away with is just by avoiding going all over the waterfall, you're doing it.”

He says if you have a powerful dream, it’s worth thinking about why. “Dreams with a strong emotion and a powerful central image, those are ones not to ignore,” he says. “The dreaming brain is serving a function, and if it gives you a nugget of an emotional and visual dream, reflect on that. That's a portal to yourself that no therapist can even get to.”

And repeated anxiety dreams, he says “I think that's something to pay attention to. That might be a vital sign for your mental health.”

Skip to main content
Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

7 surprising facts about dreams — why we have them and what they mean

Andrea Muraskin

A cloud image over a bed, representing dreaming.

An abstract 3d cloud model in the bedroom. (3d render) Eoneren/Getty Images/E+ hide caption

I had a nightmare last night.

This story also appears in the June 2 issue of the NPR Health newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Dr. Rahul Jandial Sam Lim/Penguin Random House hide caption

I spoke with Dr. Jandial about what else we can learn from our dreams, including some of modern science’s most remarkable findings, and theories, about the dreaming brain.

1. Dreams are not random

2. Our brains are super active when we dream

Jandial learned something fundamental about dreams in the midst of performing brain surgery.

But after one such zap of electricity, Jandial’s patient experienced a nightmare that had recurred for him since childhood.

3. When you first wake up, or while you're drifting off, is fertile time for creativity

4. Nightmares? Write a new script

5. Dreams about cheating are normal. They don’t mean there's something wrong with your relationship

6. Near the end of life, dreams can provide comfort

7. Dreams can be ‘a portal to your inner self’ — and mental health

And repeated anxiety dreams, he says “I think that's something to pay attention to. That might be a vital sign for your mental health.”

An official website of the United States government

Here’s how you know

Official websites use .gov A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS A lock ( Lock A locked padlock ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)

Important Information About DACA Requests

On September 13, 2023, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas issued a decision finding the DACA Final Rule unlawful and expanding its original July 16, 2021 injunction and order of vacatur to cover the Final Rule. The district court, however, maintained a partial stay of the order for “all DACA recipients who received their initial DACA status prior to July 16, 2021.”

Accordingly, current grants of DACA and related Employment Authorization Documents (EADs) remain valid until they expire, unless individually terminated. In accordance with this decision, USCIS will continue to accept and process DACA renewal requests and accompanying applications for employment authorization under the DACA regulations at 8 CFR § 236.22 and § 236.23, as it has since October 31, 2022. USCIS will also continue to accept initial DACA requests, but in accordance with the district court’s order, USCIS will not process initial DACA requests.

For more information, visit USCIS’s main DACA webpage .

Additional Information

July 19, 2021: Update: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals

Archived Information

Update: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (December 7, 2020 - Archived)
Reconsideration of the June 15, 2012 Memo Entitled "Exercising Prosecutorial Discretion with Respect to Individuals Who Came to the United States as Children" (July 28, 2020 - Archived)
Memorandum from Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen on the Rescission Of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) (June 22, 2020 - Archived)
Fact Sheet: Rescission Of Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals (DACA) (September 5, 2017 - Archived)
Preguntas frecuentes: Anulación de la acción diferida para los llegados en la infancia (DACA) (September 5, 2017 - Archived)
Anulación de la acción diferida para los llegados en la infancia (DACA) (September 5, 2017 - Archived)
Statement from Acting Secretary Duke on the Rescission Of Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals (DACA) (September 5, 2017 - Archived)
Memorandum on the Rescission Of Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals (DACA) (September 5, 2017 - Archived)
Letter from Attorney General Sessions to Acting Secretary Duke on the Rescission of DACA (September 4, 2017 - Archived)

Stacey Solomon installs 'childhood dream' feature in her garden for her kids

Stacey Solomon has fulfilled her kid's and her own 'childhood dream' feature in her garden - a zipline!

The mum-of-five, 34, revealed her children had been asking her for one for years and she finally agreed and had a 50-foot zipline installed as 'all the kids birthday presents combined'.

The former X-Factor contestant said she caved to her kid's requests as part of what she calls 2024 being her 'f**k it year' , where she has allowed herself to go for things, which she describing as 'liberating'.

Stacey and Joe moved into their dream family home in 2021, fondly named Pickle Cottage, and have celebrated many family milestones there including their wedding in 2022.

Now, they can look forward to making memories all summer long with the playground feature, calling it an 'incredible memory maker'.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Stacey Solomon (@staceysolomon)

Introducing the new garden feature, Stacey shared a wholesome video of her kids playing in it, writing: 'Pickle Cottage Zipline... Honestly this has been a dream of the kids, and quite honestly a childhood dream of mine & joes forever...

'So this year, we decided to say “f” it again and get a zipline. Here she is. 50ft of happiness from tree to tree. So grateful to have space to be able to do this.'

Stacey, who is known for her DIY projects, said she hired professionals to install the zipline so it wouldn't 'end in disaster'.

Her followers praised her for the decision to give in to her kids requests, with one writing: 'You and Joe are providing the most wonderful home life experiences for your kids. Hats off to you both for being terrific parents.'

However, many joked the zipline would be more fun for the adults, one person writing: 'Who's having more fun? You and Joe or the kids?'

And another said: 'I feel the big kid Joe is enjoying it more than the kids.'

Meet Laura Weber the Irish designer behind Team Ireland's olympic couture

Who is Ciara Mageean's partner, the one who helped her reach for gold?

Eight Irish celebrities with famous parents

Shop this cool Frida Kahlo collection and help raise money for children with disabilities in Ireland

GAA stars set to raise funds for new bereavement suites at The Coombe Hospital

Budget Beauty: This €20 invisible sunscreen is as good as ones that cost €80

Anita Rani reveals she is a 'free woman' for the first time in her life after divorce

Kerry Katona has one big regret about her relationship with ex Brian McFadden

Becca Mehigan's triple family loss left her with anxiety that ended up positively changing her life

Kildare's socialites and horsey set celebrate 30 years of Barretstown at K Club luncheon

More: trending.

IMAGES

Write essay on my dreams || essay in english || my dreams essay ||
My Ultimate Dream. As a child I have always had many dreams and goals
Essay on My Dream for all Class in 100 to 500 Words in English
Write a short essay on My Dream
Essay On My Dream for Students and Children
Write an essay on My Dream

VIDEO

Dream children
When your childhood dream comes true

COMMENTS

Childhood Dreams Essay Example
Essay On Childhood Dreams Examples. Type of paper: Essay. Topic: Cinema, Children, Sports, Childhood, Life, Dreams, World, Reality. Pages: 3. Words: 650. Published: 01/21/2020. Please note that this essay is an example for you to base your own paper on. You can also get a custom piece from an plagiarism free essay writer with reviews .
Childhood Dreams and Goals: How to Pursue Them
Photo by MI PHAM on Unsplash. M any of us can remember our childhood dreams. For some, it was becoming a doctor or a lawyer. Others dreamed of being a teacher or an astronaut. Whatever the dream ...
Childhood Memories Essays
3 pages / 1271 words. In this essay on my childhood memories I want to talk about my grandfather. My parents were busy with work most of my childhood. Therefore, my days revolved and heavily relied on my grandpa. Barsegh, my grandpa, is a work oriented man with dry and...
The Difficult Path: My Dreams and Goals in Life
Childhood dreams can be the stepping stones on the path to a successful life. In order to reach your dreams and to achieve your goals, it takes perseverance, persistence, hard-work ethic, and drive. Throughout my life, I have tried to reach all the goals I have set for myself and to reach all my dreams. No, I have not accomplished everything ...
Essay on Childhood: Samples in 100, 150 and 200 Words
Essay on Childhood in 100 Words. Childhood is that period when a child is considered to be one of the most carefree and joyful. In this period, a child has a lot of innocence, an unlimited number of opportunities and is naive. Some of the best childhood memories one can have are learning new things, playing with their friends, spending time ...
Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams Essay. Randy Pausch "last lecture" titled; " really achieving your childhood dreams, " elaborates on his achievements and the lessons he learnt during his lifetime. In his presentation, he hopes to inspire other people to fulfill their dreams through his "last lecture," which has largely been ...
Describing My Childhood Dreams and My Plan to Achieve Them
Every human being has some dream in life, which varies from person to person according ones attitude towards life. Some have a craze to become rich, others for brilliant academic career still and some others have vaulting ambition to hold some key position or a plum host. In the modern age...
You May Already Be Living the Life of Your Childhood Dreams
Key points. My 5-year-old's question about what he can be when grows up caused me to examine my own meandering path. The value of childhood dreams doesn't reside in their attainability, but in ...
How Our Childhood Dreams Affect Us Today: Understanding the ...
Childhood dreams are often pure and unbridled, free from the constraints of practicality and reality. But as we grow older, we become more aware of the challenges that come with pursuing our ...
"Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"
And we're not going to talk about things that are even more important than achieving your childhood dreams. We're not going to talk about my wife, we're not gonna talk about my kids. Because I'm good, but I'm not good enough to talk about that without tearing up. So, we're just gonna take that off the table.
Childhood Essay for Students and Essays
500+ Words Essay on Childhood. Childhood is the most fun and memorable time in anyone's life. It's the first stage of life which we enjoy in whatever way we like. Besides, this is the time that shapes up the future. The parents love and care for their children and the children to the same too. Moreover, it's the golden period of life in ...
Best Childhood Memories Essay Ideas: 94 Narrative Topics [2024]
Kindergarten is a new world for a child. It has an unfamiliar environment, new people, and rules. This essay can aim at discussing feelings and expectations that accompany a child on their first day. Describe the first pet you had in early childhood. Almost all families have a pet that they love.
Essay on My Dream for Students and Children
Keep Remembering Goal. For completing the dream you have to keep your dream in the mind. And remind this dream to yourself daily. There come hard times when you feel like quitting at those times just remember the goal it helps you stay positive. And if you feel like you messed up big times then start over with a fresh mind.
Essay on Childhood: From Skinned Knees to Heartfelt Dreams
Here are the key characteristics of childhood: Innocence and Wonder: Children experience innocence, curiosity, and wonder during childhood. Children view the world with fresh eyes, embracing magic and imagination without skepticism. Awe and fascination infuse everyday experiences during childhood. Playfulness and Spontaneity: Play is central to ...
Personal Essay: Childhood Dreams
Couldn't find very many relevant photos of me as a child for this post, as I write most of my blog posts last-minute and didn't give my parents ANY time to look for 'em. ;) But here are three from my awkward middle school days! And yes, I made the above car out of a refrigerator box, complete with a parking pass for the train to NYC. One of the biggest accomplishments of my 13 years…
Essay on My Dream: 8 Selected Essays on My Dream
Essay on My Dream - Essay 1 (100 Words) Every night I dream of living a life of a celebrity. In my dream I see myself dressed up like a model posing for cameras. It is my dream to work in the film industry and become famous. But, for that, I will have to work really hard.
How To Rekindle Your Childhood Dreams When Making A Career Change
The concept that a fulfilling job consists of these three things: an aligned job function, industry and company. Remember, people who see success with their career changes take the time to reflect ...
Childhood Dreams: How They Can Lay the Path for Your Future Career
If you have a childhood dream that you want to pursue as a career, it is essential to take steps to prepare yourself for that career path. One of the best ways to do this is to gain relevant ...
Free Essay On My Childhood Dream Is To Be A Teacher
Free Essay On My Childhood Dream Is To Be A Teacher. Type of paper: Essay. Topic: Dreams, Education, Children, Teaching, Learning, Love, Knowledge, Family. Pages: 4. Words: 1000. Published: 01/23/2020. ORDER PAPER LIKE THIS. I have a dream. Having a dream is the fuel most people need to follow their deepest and most sacred wishes until they ...
My Childhood Dreams
My Childhood Dreams. Decent Essays. 936 Words. 4 Pages. Open Document. My Childhood Dreams As I take a look back on my life, I realize how great it has truly been. I had an absolutely amazing childhood and I am beyond blessed for it. I grew up in a home with two loving parents that have been with me through it all and now of days that is ...
Personal Narrative Essay : My Childhood Dream
Personal Narrative Essay : My Childhood Dream. On the morning of March 15, 2017, I woke up in complete denial to what was going to happen in the next 48 hours of my life. My childhood dream was finally going to come true. Like any other morning I got ready for school, by brushing out my long, silky brown hair that everyone is jealous of ...
Free Essay: my childhood dreams
My childhood dreams. Children are the greatest dreamers who have ever been known by the universe. Their dreams are endless, because they are not limited by any conventions and knowledge about how the world works. In childhood fantasies everything is possible: and flying on a broomstick, and passing through the wall and turn someone and ...
Childhood Dreams Essay Examples
Essay On Childhood Dreams Examples. Please note that this essay is an example for you to base your own paper on. You can also get a custom piece from an plagiarism free essay writer with reviews. During childhood, we all dream of what we want to become when we grow up, or what we want to do in the future. I remember my childhood dreams far too ...
How I'm pursuing my childhood dream of becoming a teacher
Becoming a primary school teacher has been a dream career since I was young. I give credit to my school teachers for inspiring me, because I was motivated by their strong guidance, leadership and compassion. I knew that I wanted to do the same thing when I grew up. Kelsey's class.
7 surprising facts about dreams: why we have them and what they mean
Jandial says the lack of math makes sense because the part of your brain primarily responsible for logic — the prefrontal cortex — is typically not involved in dreaming. 2. Our brains are super active when we dream. Jandial learned something fundamental about dreams in the midst of performing brain surgery.
Your dreams can have meaning, scientists say : NPR
7. Dreams can be 'a portal to your inner self' — and mental health. Everyone has anxiety dreams from time to time. Some are literal, like dreaming you're on a podium naked when you ...
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)
DACA Decision in State of Texas, et al., v. United States of America, et al., 1:18-CV-00068, (S.D. Texas September 13, 2023). On September 13, 2023, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas issued a decision finding the DACA Final Rule unlawful and expanding its original July 16, 2021 injunction and order of vacatur to cover ...
Dawn McKenna Group
Now is your chance to fulfill your childhood dreams! The iconic Home Alone house is up for sa...". Dawn McKenna Group | Ever wanted to live like Kevin McCallister?
Stacey Solomon installs 'childhood dream' feature in garden
Stacey Solomon has fulfilled her kid's and her own 'childhood dream' feature in her garden - a zipline! The mum-of-five, 34, revealed her children had been asking her for one for years and she finally agreed and had a 50-foot zipline installed as 'all the kids birthday presents combined'. Today's top videos. The former X-Factor contestant said ...
Interpreting Dreams About Having a Baby
An in-depth conversation about baby memories could have carried over into a dream. In more abstract ways, dreaming about being a baby might mean you recently or currently feel vulnerable or ...

The Difficult Path: My Dreams and Goals in Life

Works Cited

Cite this Essay

Related Essays

Still can’t find what you need?

Related Essays on Dream

Related Topics

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

45,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

✍️Essay on Childhood: Samples in 100, 150 and 200 Words

Importance of Childhood

Essay on Childhood in 100 Words

Essay on Childhood in 150 Words

Essay on Childhood in 200 Words

Malvika Chawla

Connect With Us

Need help with?

Country Preference

Which English test are you planning to take?

When are you planning to take the exam?

Which Degree do you wish to pursue?

What is your budget to study abroad?

Make your study abroad dream a reality in January 2022 with

Essex Direct Admission Day

Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams Essay

You May Already Be Living the Life of Your Childhood Dreams

Making sense of it all

My own winding road

An insider's perspective on living with cancer

Unable to be tamed, planned, or timed, childhood dreams are still worth embracing

“Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”

Speech Transcript

Best Childhood Memories Essay Ideas: 94 Narrative Topics [2024]

🔝 Top 10 Childhood Topics to Write About

💡 Coming Up with Childhood Memories Essay Ideas

Childhood Memories List: How to Write

How to Remember Childhood Memories

🧸 Childhood Memory Essays Topics List

Early Childhood Memories Essay Topics

Elementary School Memories Essay Topics

Happy Childhood Memories Essay Topics

Funny Childhood Memories Essay Ideas

Childhood Christmas Memories Topics

✍️ “My Childhood Memories” Essay Writing Guide

Childhood Memories Essay: Dos and Don’ts

Childhood Memories Essay: Step by Step

Narrative Essay on Childhood Memories: Outline

🔗 References

Essay on My Dream for Students and Children

Determination

Staying Motivated

Keep Remembering Goal

Reward Yourself

Take Some Breaks

Stay Among Positive People

Don’t Hesitate to Make Mistakes

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Download the App

Essay on Childhood

“I don’t want to brush my teeth!”

Key Characteristics of Childhood

The Innocent Beginnings

The Playground Chronicles

School Days

The Perils of Sibling Rivalry

The Sweet Tooth Chronicles

Impact of Relationships

The Bittersweet Goodbye

My Memory of Childhood

Pro Tips for Parents

Personal Essay: Childhood Dreams

Childhood Dreams

Become an Olympic gymnast

How that transpired

Become a Broadway actress/singer

Become an author

What were your childhood dreams? Tell me you collected lizards, too.

You'll Also Love

Subscribe & Follow