There are “dream jobs” out there.

You could be an editor (the columnists do all the real work). You could be chief apologist for the Red Sox or the MBTA (the base line is pretty low).

A Marist College poll asked American adults about their “dream job” – and the results weren’t surprising.

At the top of the list (32 percent) was actor/actress, which is a fine dream if you look like Cohen the Columnist, but for most folks, the competition would be for a dwindling number of opportunities to be cast as the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Close behind was professional athlete. Again, an understandable dream, although most folks in the Northeast have ceded that opportunity to guys and gals from the South and West or Dominican Republic baseball factories – except for the MIT guys, who dream of becoming professional chess players.

In a tie for third were “rock star” and President of the United States.

Oh, sure, every boy wants to grow up to be President of the United States, so that he can take over GM, rescue banks, sort-of-stimulate the economy and invent a healthcare system named after himself.

But then, the mid-term elections come, creating a Death Panel to decide that your dream is little more than a corpse.

Tech Trumps

The latest University of Massachusetts economic report is encouraging for those seeking that dream job. The Massachusetts economy, growing faster than the national economy, should be generating dream jobs by the dozens, if not the hundreds.

The numbers suggest technology is the way to go in Massachusetts, which doesn’t leave much room for becoming an actor or professional athlete, but does allow you to dream about that Chief Technology Officer kind of job – which is sort of like being President of the United States.

Wage and salary income keeps creeping up in Massachusetts, unless you’re a newspaper columnist, in large part because the struggling housing and construction industries aren’t as essential a job creator in Massachusetts. We prefer “open space” restrictions that protect squirrels and rabbits, who are usually unemployed, but don’t show up in the numbers.

There’s a risk in all this. If Massachusetts is stumbling along at better than the national average, that takes away some of the incentive to imagine “dream jobs.” We’re so happy to be working in a finance-technology-property management-university professor kind of way, that we don’t have room in our self-satisfied brains to dream of being an actor, or, of course, President of the United States.

Back in the good-old-days, the best strategy to land a dream job was to keep job-hopping until you landed at something dreamy. A study 10 years ago in the Academy of Management Journal reported that white, male, job-hopping MBAs benefited most from the itch by large companies to find some experienced outsiders.

Today, apart from the professional athlete/actor-actress thing, the dream seems to be to set up a technology company in your garage and wait for the venture capital guys to fulfill your dream.

In many of the blue-collar enclaves, “dream jobs” often tend to be government jobs, on the order of policeman and fireman – which offer camaraderie and a sense of “public service” and, of course, pensions and health insurance and something approaching job security.

The U.S. Labor Department predicts bad times for those seeking the textile-shoe-machine tool kind of employment, which is no surprise to the mill towns of Massachusetts.

A Pew Research Center survey of adults aged 18 to 29 found that the dream of a “high-paying career” was pretty far down the list of priorities – trumped by such stuff as being a good parent, helping others in need, and having a successful marriage. The “career” thing finished in a dismal tie with “living a very religious life,” which suggests that perhaps one must pray for a dream job.

Another option, of course, is to do what that JetBlue flight attendant chose to do: Grab a beer and jump out the office tower window. That’s a dream of sorts.

Mitt Romney keeps jumping out of windows, looking for his dream job – that President of the United States gig.

No beer. It’s a Mormon thing.