Do you dream? I'm sure you do. Somebody once told me that there are three common nightmares that many people have regularly: being naked in a public place, falling off a cliff (apparently if you hit the bottom in the dream you die in real life, but to date nobody has been able to confirm that), and being just a few weeks away from a major examination without having done any revision. I get that last one at least once a year (unfortunately for me, it is not so much a dream as a memory!).

Lawrence of Arabia, as he came to be known, had a different view of dreams as he grew up in Oxford, the 'city of dreaming spires'. He had a dream of an Arabia for the Arabs, free from the imperialism of the Turks, British, Italians and French. His was not a dream that was experienced during the course of sleep, but a vision worked out in the harsh sands of the Arabian Desert. In the introduction to his classic work, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he writes: "All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.”

Don't you find those last three words compelling? "This I did." In those three words is the determination not just to dream, but (even allowing for the possibility of failure) to give everything to seeing those dreams fulfilled. And it is a determination to have those dreams fulfilled not just for ourselves, but for the greater good.

I sometimes wonder whether we find our dreams so hard to pursue because we simply cannot imagine them. When I was a small boy, I used to sit in front of the coal fire in our living room, gaze into the labyrinth of glowing ash and flame and just...imagine. I wish I did more of that now. I think we too easily imprison imagination in the world of childhood. Sometimes it's difficult to imagine things being any different. That's not hard to understand; our very survival depends on us taking reality seriously. And yet, a lack of the ability to imagine will tie us to the belief that life can never be different to how it is today.

Albert Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world and all there ever will be to know and understand." Perhaps there's a kind of imagination that takes vision, courage, and even faith.

Dale Carnegie said, "Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours."

What do you dream of? Do you encourage your children and grandchildren to dream big?

Rob Parsons is the founder of national charity Care for the Family and author of The Wisdom House, a series of life lessons from a grandfather to his grandchildren, available at Amazon.