The book Doing Dreams

Visibility is an important factor for Doing Dreams to become a success: visibility of the children, their schools, their families and their lives. For the project ‘Doing Dreams’ in The Netherlands and Brazil, we worked with students from a school in Amsterdam and in São Paulo to find their dreams. For a year we worked with them on their talents, passions and expectations of their profession and adult lives: “What is your dream of the future?”

They have written stories about their dreams and we visualized their dream by taking pictures of them at the place of their dream. Their stories and portraits together with their life stories and Polaroid photos of their homes constitute the book ‘Doing Dreams’. What you also find in the book are the letters they wrote to the place of their dreams, and which made their encounter with the reality of their dream possible.

This book shows the talents and possibilities of these children. It is up to the reader of the book to act upon it. Based on working with teaching about dreams for over a year, we developed a method to teach children how to dream about their future and see all the possibilities that exist. This can be part of the regular curriculum. That was the dream of the team of people who worked on this: that children would gain the ability to dream and influence their environment, contrary to the life experiences they had until now.

The question is what you can do for these children, these students who already step into society with arrears. What would our education system look like, if they were the ones who influenced it with their dreams and imagination?

The book is published in Dutch and Portuguese. To order a copy, just send us an e-mail your name and address.