I have a daydreaming problem - one which I only recently noticed.
There are people, of course, who are utterly unable to separate fantasy from reality – to the point they can't function in the day-to-day world. I'm talking about something less dramatic than that.
My problem is (I think) that I tend to start with a real occurrence, or phenomenon, or even person, develop speculative assumptions or even fantasies, then forget where lies the demarcation between reality and fantasy.
An example of this would be a woman I knew about ten years ago who I thought was very interested in me. We spent a lot of time just hanging around together, and I began to speculate about what a relationship with her would be like. Not just sex, but how we would live, what we would do with our free time, where we'd go on vacation.
I never reached the point that I actually thought we were in a relationship – I'm not that easily self-deluded. But the line separating reality from my fantasy was off in the gray mist somewhere, beyond my range of vision.
So when I actually suggested a relationship, and she looked at me like I had just dropped stark naked from out of a tree, I was jolted back into a rather unpleasant reality from which I had taken something of a vacation.
Now, part of this may have been – probably was, frankly – that she deliberately encouraged it. She wasn't interested in me, but she was interested in me being interested in her. She enjoyed the attention.
But I've come to realize that an equal or larger part was that I got confused about where our friendship actually stood, and came to conclude that we were much closer than we really were. Even now I can't tell you where the line between reality and daydream really was. I just know that some of what was going on between us was happening only in my imagination, and I lost track of what had really happened versus what I just imagined had happened or wanted to have happen.
I don't think I'm unusual in this respect.
Buddhist teaching covers a lot of ground about seeing things as they are, and not seeing them through the distorting filters of desires, attachments, fears, suspicions, prejudices and the like.
Daydreaming is, it seems to me, about seeing things totally not as they are, but giving full sway to all the distorting filters.
Sometimes the results are beneficial. Jules Verne could daydream about Captain Nemo and his mysterious submarine and even invent the periscope in the process. But that didn't lead to him walking down to the pier every day to wait for the Nautilus to surface.
I am not a Jules Verne, nor are most of us. My daydreams will not inspire or entertain others. They do have the capacity to cause me misery, because I can't always sort out what is real from what I've just cooked up in my imagination.
4 comments:
I think this is one of those times when what I should do is punch you playfully on the shoulder, give you a bear hug and get a speck of dirt in my eye.
Well, it COULD happen.
I identify with this daydream stuff of yours. I have imaginary conversations in which I dream up what I shoulda said and what I'll say next time. I get focused on how things shoulda coulda oughta been or might sometime be or whatever. Whenever I'm not in my right now, I'm not just off the beam, I'm no where in the vicinity.
People sometimes ask me why I don't watch television and how I can keep up my busy (hack cough) social life. It's simply a matter of me doing what I know to do to actually have a life instead of a lifestyle, a borrowed life, an imagined life, a cyber life, a virtual life, an unexamined life.
Part of the reason why I don't much miss journalism is that I simply tired of being a voyeur and wanted to participate instead of spectate. My range of action and decision is far more limited than I like, by money, laws, morals, ethics, a thousand mammas and daddies telling me what to do, think and/or feel. Don't get me wrong; I don't advocate anarchy. I only mean that the ultimate expression of my human free will, if such a thing actually exists, is to make Sartian choices as well as I can and as often as I can.
I must resolutely remind myself to be led by my hopes and not driven by my fears.
My only defense for these decisions is utilitarian: it works for me, Dr. Phil.
As bad as it gets, when I'm introspective and isolating, spending 24/7 involved with my "might have beens", that's when I most need to get out of the damn house and do something, see someone, go somewhere. If I can't write it, paint it, blog it, fuck it.
Oh, the night life ain't no good life, but it's my life.
blogblah!!!
I've lived as a daydream believer most of my life. In fact, it has only been within the last five years that I've had any sort of awareness that I lived there. I might average 2 months a year outside the daydream realm. Maybe.
xnwfs
Mike, why haven't you come over this weekend? Where have you been? Don't you want me? I thought we were going to go to The Ozarks together this weekend. I believed you were going to quit your job and stay home with me...forever. Why are you doing this to me?
When trying to choose between "reality" and the goings-on in my skull, I find the latter far more enjoyable.
Non-John X RealityConstructs seem to be little more than probability waves anyhow, and the experiments we conduct to try to figure out what is "real" are subject to gross errors of input and interpretation.
Eat pizza, drink beer, be nice to cats. Do that and you will achieve a certain kind of enlightenment.
Also, read QUANTUM PSYCHOLOGY by the late and very great leprechaun philosopher Robert Anton Wilson.
FNORD!
Post a Comment