Why do adults love to ask children what they want to be when they grow up?

We know the country will not one day be run by firefighters and veterinarians.

Maybe it's because the answers are a chance to glance into a child's imagination. It's shorthand to discover their interests, no matter how fleeting, and hear about something that fascinates them.

But, more than that, perhaps it's because their dreams reconnect us to the possible.

Do you remember what you wanted to be when you didn't know what you couldn't be?

I was recently asked about my own childhood dreams by Dehra Glueck, who wanted to grow up to play with dolphins and sea lions. As she got a little older, her dreams turned toward Hollywood. She loved the movies. Rather than following either of these paths, the 35-year-old Wildwood mother of two grew up to become a successful child psychiatrist.

She was reminded of her own childhood dreams last year by the late Randy Pauch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Pauch gave an inspiring final lecture to hundreds of students in September 2007 after getting a diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer. The "Last Lecture" video is captivating and quickly went viral. Pauch spoke of "Really Achieving your Childhood Dreams." He tells his own story of chasing those dreams and how it enriched his life, which ended at age 47.

Pauch's message spoke so powerfully to Glueck that she decided to reconnect with her childhood ambitions. She signed up for a daylong session at the St. Louis Zoo in which volunteers can spend the day training sea lions. Her children came to watch her during the sea lion show.

"I'm not going to leave my profession and become a marine biologist, but doing that was powerful," she said, partly because she got to see herself as someone who does the things that matter to her. Since then, she has also spent a week in California at a screenwriting boot camp and has written several screenplays.

And, she's started talking to people about their own childhood dreams, how they fit into their current lives. Glueck created a website, www.thedreamingyou.com, to give people a supportive place to reconnect with those dreams and step-by-step encouragement from others.

When Glueck asked me, it took me back to my mad scientist phase as a child. I had nailed sandwich bags filled with various food items on my bedroom wall to see how long it would take different things to grow mold. I had plastic cups in the freezer with ants I was trying to revive from their frozen demise. I remembered using my Easy-Bake Oven to conduct science experiments.

Looking back, I'm amazed that my mother, a complete clean-freak, allowed mold to grow unabated in my room. She never threw out a single frozen ant.

When my daughter was 5, she wanted to be rock star when she grew up. Two years later, she wants to be an artist-inventor "like Leonardo DaVinci."

Part of me can't help but think, "Good luck with that, baby doll." But, my stronger impulse is to encourage her and dream with her. We give our children more allowance for possibility than we give for ourselves. Our children get their cues from how we respond to their dreams but also from how we treat and value our own.

So, ask yourself: What did you want to be before you grew up?