At the age of six, Myrian Castello watched it on TV: in 2025, the planet’s water will run out; it was a despair.It was necessary to warn the adults.
Adults, they never pay attention to what really matters, so she ran to call a cousin, a peer of her own age; he was her dream partner. Our best dream is always collective. The heart and the imagination of a child, such a child, are not prepared for such news: that the planet will run out of water by 2025. She goes out to make something happen, goes out to postpone the end of the world. The adult arranges a meeting in 15 days, the invitation goes by e-mail.
There wasn’t an adult, she said, even an adult, in those days, who didn’t receive an alarming little card with the news of the near end of the water. And a request: save up, please. They distributed dozens of them, she never forgot that, more than two decades later, she told me.
Myrian explains that it was the first time she dreamed and made it come true in this life, then came many others. Like that time she invented an Anti Stress product to gift her father, there was even a production line that involved a bladder and some kind of flour. This business of dreaming and bringing things to the world was just her way, it didn´t work out, she fell into Engineering. It was there that she learned how things work, came out knowing more about the workings of herself and with a decision: “I want to give the dream back to people”.
It’s just that almost everything in college was so different from what it could be, that she couldn’t find herself there. We have to be present to be able to dream. Then she found out that almost nobody found themselves, it was such a waste of life. Why those long classes, without any connection with the people, when we could learn how gears work by watching a sugarcane broth cart? And then still have a drink and the over pour of it. Everything got worse for the better when Myrian met GSA Program, the Cooperative Games: “For the first time I didn’t feel alone in the world. I found my community.
It could not have had another name, an organization that was born from her restlessness and from her various friends found along that path: Factory of Dreams. There was a class, once, in which Myrian described it as a trip to hell, when she came across a hot place, which came out on fire from everywhere: it was a truck company, she was traumatized. Hence the reason for being a factory now too, but of another kind: the one that make us born again.
The dream is important because it brings the right to exist. It helps you getting out of some places, get moving. It’s about inviting people to go wherever they want, imagining those places,” she summarizes. It happened to her when she left college, she was welcomed by her parents in her decision; they understood that Myrian’s heart was not in the classroom; she wanted to dedicate herself to that now, to make people dream again. She truely felt herself when she discovered that dreaming is already a habit of many people out there. Those people she met in the GSA Warriors.
From 2016 to now, Myrian runs the Dream Factory, a place to dream with ethics and love. “We work for dreams that do not hurt other people.” Now she wants to put dreaming within the Brazilian Constitution: “It is a human right, the State needs to guarantee conditions so that all people can dream and realize their dreams. At the Factory we work for that”, she defends. Each person dreams in a particular way, but there are some conditions that favor the birth of dreaming people and environments. Myrian highlights some of them:
“To dream, we need basic needs met. If you are in a safe environment, with food every day, you feel confident taking other steps,” it was the first tip. “To dream, we need to have inspirations around, something or someone that we can see is possible, already see happening,” the second, which relates to the third point in some way: cheerleaders.
Those who dream presume to have people who believe around them”. It is the one who stimulates, encourages. It’s someone who will always be happy with your progress, but will also ask: what can I do to help you getting there faster? She details.”Everyone has had someone looking at you with a frown on their face when you tell them about a dream; it takes away your energy right away.
Everything up to this point is important, but the most important thing is now: “When we get to a community, we always find someone who is in the key of scarcity, you know. It happens because this person has already received many no’s in life, dreaming has become too distant for her”, Myrian explains. “We need to blow out the ember that is almost dying out.
