The dangers of daydreaming

My sister once said to me: "You are an excellent observer of life, but not much of a participant."

In fact, she may have been overly generous.  I'm really not that great an observer, either.

While on the phone, I'll often simultaneously watch TV and read a book.  If I were any good at any of these things, then "multitasking" would be my 21st-century superpower.  Unfortunately, if you quiz me afterwards on whom I was talking to, what happened in my show, or what language the book was in, I really won't be able to tell you.

I walk down streets in a daze that's alternately cheerful and heart-breaking.  Once, while taking the train to see a friend, I began sobbing silently for no reason.  The people to either side of me probably thought I had lost someone close to me.  They stared at me with vague expressions of pity and alarm, like you would at a dog that had only three legs but a really ferocious set of teeth.

But my daydreams are usually of a much happier variety.  I'll frequently stroll down the road smiling to myself for no reason and nodding acknowledgement at the trees, as if they've just said something incredibly witty.  The other night, after a particularly entertaining conversation with my roommate, I sat on the couch and was struck by an especially funny thought.  I started laughing.  I didn't realize that my roommate was still lurking in the far corner of the room, and she turned to stare.  I tried to sober up but my secret was out.

"Do you talk to yourself?" she wanted to know.

"Uh yes.  Everyone does, right?" I said, mouthing a platitude I remembered from grade school and, up until that moment anyway, still believed.   Also, I reasoned that my roommate and I are friends.  No doubt she'd find my daydreaming an endearing quirk, like how all of the illiterate townspeople in "Beauty and the Beast" claimed to dislike Belle's constant swanning dreamily around but secretly liked it.  I think.

"I'm pretty sure that means you're cracked," my roommate said, cutting into an emerging daydream about wandering around the French countryside eating baguettes and reading fairy tales.

What do I dream about?  That's the strange part.  My daydreams are, I'm convinced, unusually and unnaturally vivid.  And embarrassing.  I dream of starring in movies or traveling to France.  Or starring in movies about travel to France.  I dream about walking down the street with a friend I haven't seen in years, I dream about one day buying things that today I can't afford.  I daydream about being asked for my autograph in the street.  I dream about books - it's terrifying how often I insert myself among the characters and settings of books that I've read. 

But there is light at the end of the Wikitunnel: "There are numerous examples of people in creative or artistic careers, such as composers, novelists and filmmakers, developing new ideas through daydreaming."

The weird part is that although I've written many, many articles, poems and stories over the years, nothing I've written bears any resemblance to anything I daydream about.  After all, my daydreams are about me, and my stories are not.

As a result, I'm always entertained, but I rarely know where I'm going.  My sense of direction is legendary, to the point that doing the opposite of whatever I recommend is probably the fastest way to get where you want to go.  I stop having phone conversations but forget to turn off the phone, so that the other person keeps talking for several minutes before realizing that I'm no longer really present.

Of course, scientists are not without their uses, and many of them have spent time studying daydreaming.

Here's one report: "Recently a case study was published in which a 36 year old female has a long history of excessive daydreaming. As a child between 4 to 10 years of age she would spend periods of free time, sometimes several hours, walking in circles shaking a string, while imagining creative stories in which she was the central focus, i.e., ‘‘just like playing school with other kids, but in my head.” Extensive psychiatric and somatic investigations could not find anything wrong with her."

I relate to this woman more than is humanly healthy.  It's possible - and in fact likely - that in some swampy childhood past I hit upon the idea of daydreams as a way to distract myself from unpleasant realities.  As I've mentioned before, I was a bit of a depressed and misanthropic kid sometimes, and there's no denying that inventing pleasant daydreams helped me cope.

Now, daydreams are a holdover, and I think I do it for much the same reason that people continue to sleep with a childhood blanket or go home for Thanksgiving.  It makes me happy, not the way it used to, but because it used to.

The place I daydream the most, of course, is the gym.  In fact, I think I go to the gym partly to relieve the intense weight of daydreams that would otherwise build up in me during the workday.  The gym is where my daydreaming comes into dramatic conflict with the 24/7 news cycle.

As anyone's cranky grandfather can tell you, all the news is depressing.  My fancy gym has ten different flat wide-screen TV's mounted on the wall across from the treadmills and ellipticals.  At any given time, at least five of these TVs are tuned to news channels that cover a wide range of subjects, from disaster to mayhem. 

Unfortunately, I tend to start out on the gym equipment and daydream more and more with time.  I'll plug in my headphones and drift away on the tides of imagination.  Two days ago, I was daydreaming about something - I think I was imaginging a particularly fun trip to New Orleans' French Quarter - when I happened to look up and realize that the person next to me was staring at me with a mixture of rage and disgust.

This is not the kind of look I'm used to.  After a quick glance around assured me that I was still looking decent and on the elliptical, I looked up, and found the source of her irritation.  The TV right above my particular machine was showing a repeating interview of a Japanese woman who had lost her baby daughter to the recent tsunami.  She was sobbing as she explained that she'd seen her little girl disappear into the sea.  Every few minutes, the channel would cut from this interview to images of the refugees who had been made homeless by the massive nuclear leak elsewhere in Japan.

I'm not without sympathy, and I was horrified by what was happening on the screen.  It also ocurred to me that while I had been sweating cheerfully away and cackling to myself, the woman on the elliptical next to me thought I had been laughing at the horrible news out of Japan.

This made me feel insanely and unreasonably guilty.  For the next several minutes I dedicatedly watched the news and made exaggerated grimaces of misery and sorrow.  "God, how awful," I even muttered at one point, but the woman next to me gave no sign of hearing.  I imagined - daydreamed? - leaping from my elliptical and explaining to her what the reality was, but it ocurred to me that if I jumped into her face and started babbling about my daydreams (particularly after giggling at the news) she would probably have me expelled from the gym.

So instead I marinated away in my private bath of misanthropy. 

There was a time, back when I was in college, that I consciously decided to stop daydreaming.  It was very, very difficult, and at times I felt like I was trying to train a cat to behave like a dog.  I'd invested years of my life in trying to ignore the present, and learning to do the opposite was a bit painful.  In the end, I've allowed daydreaming back into my life in cautious and occasional doses.  None of this was something I could explain to the woman at the gym, though.  Instead I just daydreamed about the day I would eventually be famous enough that people would think my daydreaming was an endearing quirk.  It was a nice dream.  I might have that one again sometime, provided I'm not watching the news at the time.