Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilites. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

Steinem links imagination to practical change: “leaps” and “dreaming” are not escapism but the mental work that makes new futures conceivable. Without that capacity, life (and politics) shrink to managing what already exists, and the motivating “excitement of possibilities” disappears. By calling dreaming “a form of planning,” she collapses the usual opposition between idealism and realism—suggesting that envisioning alternatives is an early, necessary stage of strategy. The line also fits a feminist and social-justice frame: movements begin by imagining conditions that dominant culture treats as impossible, then translating those visions into goals, coalitions, and action.