Does each of us have one core fantasy, a single axis upon which our entire personality turns? The Enneagram is predicated upon this principle: it suggests that people can be grouped based on their worldview, or if you like, their survival strategy. Their aesthetic tastes, their scheduling habits, their conversation style, their career and their love life are all manifestations of this one view that is at the core of their being. For example, “I can’t trust anyone, it’s me against the world,” or “No one will ever love me,” or “If I could just prove that I’m worthy, then they’ll love me.” On the one hand, my gut tells me that people cannot possibly be so simple. On the other hand, I find that most of us are, on the whole, pretty consistent in our values, tastes and habits. So, can the self really be boiled down to a single core fantasy? Or are we instead a constellation of fantasies, a decentralized self composed of independent moods or parts?
If I can be said to have a core fantasy, it comes through pretty clearly in the Lobi story. The fantasy of Crastor and Lobi is an old one. It began forming in my World of Warcraft days, so I was about 12-14 years old. In the fantasy of Crastor in Lobi’s village, Crastor stumbles upon a whole new world and feels an immediate connection with it. He is surprised to find that the people welcome him and accept him for who he is. Meanwhile, Lobi, the most beautiful of her exotic people, is a sort of tour guide, mediating this connection. Crastor falls for her, but the love doesn’t last long. He ultimately discovers that he wasn’t really in love with Lobi. He was in love with her community, or at least with the sense of belonging that it represented.
My core fantasy goes something like this: I am an outsider, desperate for a sense of belonging. Then someone or something amazing comes along, and I think I’ve finally found where I belong. Sooner or later, I am cast out or abandoned, and the cycle begins again. It is a cycle of loneliness, joyous belonging, and abandonment. Pretty much all of the fantasies I’ve shown you so far look something like this. Crastor falls head over heels for the purple people, for Cara, for the church, for Lobi, and will continue to fall for various other people and groups. Like Crastor I have a tendency to throw myself at things, and to have zero boundaries early in the relationship. I want to lose myself in whatever big beautiful thing has come along to save me from the agony of being alone. It always ends badly. It’s a lot of love and loss. In a way, it is a kind of ‘kicked out of Eden’ story. The moral is, “I will find paradise, it just won’t last.”
Let’s take seriously this hypothesis that each person’s personality can be reduced to a single core fantasy. To demonstrate the viability of this hypothesis, I’ll use my middle school summers at band camp as an example. The place was nestled in the mountains. The air was tinged with the crisp scent of pines, and the outdoor amphitheater overlooked the forest that cascaded down the mountain. The nearest town was tiny. Every night under a clear, starry sky, we sang songs and shared our feelings around a crackling campfire. We did chores together, gave each other back rubs, went for hikes together and then took naps afterward. On most days we spent at least eight hours making music, and on top of that we were arranging smaller ensembles, talent shows, and spontaneous jam sessions. Once we even put on a last-minute parade through town. There was such love among us, such a strong sense of community, and such a profound sense of place.
And my god, how I remember the women! There was doe-eyed Anna, who slept and exercised in her voluminous sports bra. There was Gwen, the laid-back hippie who didn’t shave her armpits and smelled of patchouli. There was Charlotte, who played clarinet like an angel and had the hips of a goddess. And then there was our cabin’s counselor, who sported a flirtatious pixie cut and a tasteful little tattoo on her neck, and who read us bedtime stories in a soft, tender voice.
I was only there for two summers, but my mother recalls that both times she picked me up at the end, I cried so hard she felt a little bad pulling me away. I probably had as many crushes in those two summers at camp as I did in all my years of high school. At the time, I felt like I was in paradise.
To tie band camp to the Lobi fantasy, let’s look at two components of the daydream that have been at its core from the beginning: the fetishization of Lobi’s exoticism, and the briefness of her and Crastor’s relationship. Let’s look first at the exoticism. In the video game and the daydream Lobi was a shaman, a class of character whose magic is very earthy and is styled as some sort of vaguely indigenous spirituality. I’ve always been excited by this romanticized indigeneity. These wise and ‘primitive’ people show me the way to earth, community and spirituality, to ancient and universal virtues that my modern world has lost touch with. In a way, the fantasy implies that you can’t find home at home. Love and belonging must be discovered in some obscure and exotic place, preferably some place that is fixed in an ahistorical past. That would explain why most of everyday life is such a miserable slog. Love isn’t gone, it’s just been hiding somewhere very far away all this time, waiting to be discovered!
Furthermore, you can’t stay in paradise forever. Though the Crastor-Lobi fantasy took many forms over the years, their relationship was always brief. Sometimes she left him because her people needed her, sometimes she was killed or taken away, or sometimes they were star-crossed lovers. There was always a tragic air about their friendship, and somehow or other it ended abruptly. In my fictionalized account of the daydream, I tried to capture this air of tragedy by having Lobi turn against Crastor, but the truth is that the daydream always had many endings, and since this is such an old daydream I can’t recall whether there was ever a definitive one. Suffice to say that they never lived happily ever after. It had to end abruptly.
These two aspects of the fantasy, the exoticism and the briefness, are congruent with my situation at summer camp. The camp was far away in a magical land, situated in a savage forest but bound by such heart-warming values as fairness, cooperation, friendship, and respect for nature. There was a certain tragedy about it all, because summer camp could only last for a short time. All of this made my summer camp a kind of Aezeroth, and though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was unconsciously looking around for Lobi. The girls at camp weren’t really any more special than the girls I met at home. The difference is that at camp, I was living my fantasy of stumbling onto a primitive paradise. It could only last for a limited time, and so it was bound to end in tragedy.
To say I fell in love with camp, or with the girls at camp, is only half of the story. The full story is that camp was concordant with an exciting fantasy, and the love I felt was contingent upon that concordance. That overwhelming love I felt at camp would not have happened without this fantasy—not the Lobi story per se, but this deep, unconscious sense that I can find paradise for a limited time. Camp was the perfect setup to enact my core fantasy. That setup made the love possible.
It is worth pausing to consider the role of music in both my band camp and in my daydream. Crastor’s dance with the Toluma women is one of the oldest images in the Lobi fantasy, and one of the few that I still return to from time to time. A little investigation would reveal that perhaps my favorite thing about music is that I can lose myself in it. Music thus actually embodies my core fantasy of disappearing into something big and beautiful for a limited time. When I made music with my buddies at band camp, I was losing myself in the ecstasy of belonging again and again, all day long. I was transported into paradise by the group harmony. No wonder I felt love and magic in the air.
My core fantasy comes out in many of my behaviors. For example, there is the fact that I can never seem to stay in love with any particular band, movie or book, even though I would love to belong to a fan club. Or there is the fact that I would love to have a coherent fashion style, but I always get tired of whatever I’ve decided on, so that my wardrobe is a weird mix of goth, hippie and tweed academic. It’s always the same old pattern—outsider looking for belonging is ultimately disappointed. I unconsciously find reasons to fall out of love, because that allows the love-loss cycle to continue, and my worldview is reinforced. To stay in love with something would challenge the core fantasy that the only things worth loving don’t last.
And yet there is a wrench in the works—there are ways in which my behavior contradicts my core fantasy. For example, as much as I long to belong, to blend in, to disappear, I am also fiercely independent. I insist on doing things my own way, and I hate being taken care of. I have often dreamed of one day going off the grid and of growing my own food. I hate resorts, pedicures, and gifts. I don’t even like to use the dishwasher. Washing my own dishes makes me feel independent and free. Meanwhile, there are other times when I am capable of finding a reasonable middle ground. If I set my intentions properly, I can draw clear boundaries. I can collaborate without losing myself in the team. There are times when I can head off my natural tendencies before they get out of control. These other attitudes are not enactments of my core fantasy. The former is a rebellion against the fantasy, while the latter is an attempt to transcend it. We have a variety of behaviors that are not enactments of the core fantasy. So how do we reconcile these two facts? On the one hand, I do have a core fantasy. On the other hand, I have a multiplicity of attitudes toward it.
I believe the view of the self as a single core fantasy and the view of the self as a decentralized multiplicity of parts are not incompatible views. Our multiple parts can be characterized as reactions to the core fantasy. The core fantasy is the common thread that runs through all of them. Sometimes we love it, sometimes we hate it, sometimes we try to play it cool and act like we don’t care, sometimes we try to dominate it, sometimes we are painfully aware that we are being dominated by it. Even when we feel that we have found a clear idea of how we wish to relate to the core fantasy, we struggle against the myriad other relationships that naturally come up. We say to ourselves, “Gosh darn it, I promised myself I wasn’t going to make X mistake anymore, but there I went and did it again.” Today’s sin may be tomorrow’s necessary indulgence. Yesterday’s paradise may be today’s embarrassing mistake. It is human nature to play around with the core fantasy. We never settle down on one relationship to it.
This is not my idea—I got it from Crastor. Through him, I re-imagine the core fantasy over and over again. Sometimes my paradise is a cold-hearted bitch, sometimes it’s an innocent waif, sometimes it’s chaos magic, other times a network of portals. Sometimes he loves paradise, sometimes he hates it, sometimes he needs to save it, sometimes it needs to save him. My daydreams do not just tell one story, nor are they unrelated to each other. They are variations on a theme. Each mood is driven by its own conception of the core fantasy. To say that one person is just their core fantasy is like saying a song is just its melody. It is a pretty decent summary, if one wishes to summarize the self. But if one wishes to truly understand oneself, one must look at this process of pushing and pulling on the theme, of turning it upside down, of leaving it and returning to it. Like a piece of music, it is in this process of playing with the theme that our unique and special qualities can be found.