A child born on the first day of the new Millennium will live an entire lifetime in a world undreamt of just a generation ago. As much as we might have tried to speculate upon the shape of things to come, the twenty-first century arrives just as unformed as a newborn.

When a child enters the world, it knows nearly nothing of the universe beyond itself. With mouth, then eyes, and finally, hands, it reaches out to discover the character of the surrounding world. Over the course of time, that child will discover its Mother - the source of life - and, sometime later, its Father. But in the first days after birth, the child will be presented with rattles, mobiles, mirrors and noisy stuffed animals that will become its constant companions. Our children, in nearly every imaginable situation, are accompanied by toys.

It has been this way for a very long time. We can trace the prehistoric sharpened stick - undoubtedly the first tool - to the sticks children still love to play with today. Over the 5500 years of recorded history, forward from Sumer and Egypt, toys have a presence both charming and enlightening, for we have learned that toys not only help to form the imaginations of our children, but also reflect the cultural imagination back upon us. The ancient Maya, who thrived across Mesoamerica thirteen centuries ago, never developed the wheel for transportation - already in use for some seven thousand years in Mesopotamia - yet employed it in toys. The Mayan world-view - based in circles and cycles of sky and earth, brought them the wheel as a toy, a pocket universe which reflected the structure of the whole cosmos.

All of our toys, for all of known time, perform the same role of reducing the complex universe of human culture into forms that children can grasp. I am not saying that children are simple, unable to apprehend the complex relationships which form cultures, rather, that toys help the child to guide itself into culture, playgrounds where rehearsals for reality can proceed without constraint or self-consciousness.

These points have been made before, but have gained unusual currency over the last few years, as the character of our toys has begun to change, reflecting a new imagining of ourselves and the world we live in. Somewhere in the time between Project Apollo and the Mars Pathfinder we learned how to make the world react to our presence within it, sprinkling some of our intelligence into the universe-at-large in much the same way a chef seasons a fine sauce. Our toys, touched by fairy dust, have come alive, like Pinocchio; some - like the incredibly popular Furby - simulate ever-more-realistic personalities.

Although the Furby seems to have come from nowhere to capture the hearts of children worldwide, in reality, it incorporates everything we already know about how the future will behave. The world reacts to us - interacts with us - at a growing level of intelligence and flexibility. A century ago people marveled at the power and control of the electric light, which turned the night into day and ushered in a twenty-four hour world. Today we and our children are amazed by a synthetic creature possessing a dim image of our own consciousness and announcing the advent of a playful world, where the gulf between wish and reality collapses to produce a new kind of creativity.

Toys can serve as points of departure for another voyage of exploration, a search for the world of our children's expectations. As much as a spear or wheel or astronaut figurine ever shaped a child's view of the world, these toys - because they now react to us - tell us that our children will have a different view of the "interior" nature of the world, seeing it as potentially vital, intelligent, and infinitely transformable. The "dead" world of objects before intelligence and interactivity will not exist for them, and, as they grow to adulthood, they will likely demand that the world remain as pliable as they remember from their youngest days. Fortunately, we are ready for that challenge. Just as the creative world of children has become manipulable, programmable and mutable, the entire fabric of the material world seems poised on the edge of a similar transformation. That, at essence, is the theme of this book, because where our children are already going, we look to follow.

In the evolving relationship between imagination and reality, toys show us how we teach the ways of this new world to our children. Their toys tell them everything they need to know about where they are going, providing them the opportunity to develop a mind-set which will make the radical freedom offered in such a world an attractive possibility. Many of us - "older" people - will find that freedom chaotic, discomforting - if not downright disorienting, and it will be up to our children to teach us how to find our way in a world we were not born into.

All around us, the world is coming alive, infused with information and capability; this is the only reality for our children, and it speaks louder than any lesson taught in any school, because the lesson is repeated - reinforced - with every button's touch. But it is up to us to rise to the challenge of a playful world, to finish the work of culture and change the nature of reality. It might seem, even after all of this, to be nothing more than a dream; but this is a book about dreams made real. So, follow on, as we trace a path through a world that is rising to meet us...