How we stopped dreaming...

I remember as a child how i used to run up to the corner of a room, plonk my tiny butt on the floor and empty two buckets of LEGO (im assuming that most of you know what this is) and thats it; the world around me as i knew it, came to a stand still. No hunger, no urge to run to the toilet (although being a lil kid in itself comes with this privilege!)...nothin ever seemed to bother me. It was just the three of us; I, me and myself.

I would spend hours at a stretch, coming up with some whacky contraptions that moved in ways we never even thought possible. Such weird machines, creatures and what not, which were nothing but fruits of my imagination, dreams and creativity...completely uninhibited by the likes of REALITY and FACTS. I could remember an incident, wherein i had made many lil houses and one weird lil contraption sitting next to each house. When i explained all this to my mom, my mother asked me, "But where are the roads to the houses kunju?"..and looking at her face as if she had called a baboon a bus..i sprung up and replied.."No roads...cars fly..." and demonstrating what i just said using my appendages and generous helpings of sounds, just to be sure that my mother; who is grounded to reality, got what i had made.

It was all so simple back then, i just had to think or dream of something, for it to show in my "work". I wasn't tied down by functions,facts and figures. I could in effect do what came to my mind. Nothing or no one hindered the flow of thoughts being converted to action...whether they made sense or not. I didn't care if people liked/cared about what i did/made. The very fact that i had MADE something that i had THOUGHT of was fulfilling in itself.
But somewhere along the road...things changed...

...I became aware of facts and realities, about what could be done and what couldn't, about how something should be done and how something shouldn't. Slowly but steadily down the line, i didn't have to THINK anymore. I just had to accept what some bearded old fart or some eccentric nut had stated eons ago (whether it made sense to me or not) and try and apply it to problems in todays world, that didn't concern me in the first place. Somewhere down the line, i was told to stop thinking because, people before me had already done all the thinking and i only had to follow what they had come up with. Not only was i encouraged NOT to think on my own, i was actually penalized by my teachers, professors etc for doing so! I remember in one of my exams in lower-secondary school, i had to write an essay about space exploration, since the teacher had just finished a chapter on it. Instead of writing about what the teacher had read out from the text book, i came up with my own version of how stuff worked/should work. Not only did i end up getting a ZERO in the essay, i was lectured at lengths about what i had written made no sense. Why did it make no sense?...because it wasn't in the books.

I wonder which books Newton, Einstein, Faraday or any one of those 10000 guys referred. I wonder where the human race would have stood today, had all their ideas been shot down because "it didn't make sense" to others. I wonder how mankind would have evolved, if every single one of them thought or was made to think in the exact same way.

I don't care about the co-efficient of friction between the tires of a car and the road, i want cars to fly dammit!