Any poem, play, painting or porno reveals our fantasies. But what happens when the show is over and we are left alone with the echoes of its images? Who decides which images stick in our imagination? What might those images say about who we are?
I have been a big daydreamer for as long as I can remember. I have an elaborate world in my head, a crude collage of fantasy franchises. It’s a world of tragic falls, cheap thrills, zombies and vampires. Episodes and elements of this world come to me, sometimes despite my own chagrin or dismay, and they can stick around for years. I visit this world (or it visits me) daily. While daydreaming I talk, gesture, stalk and swagger as my characters. Sometimes unbidden daydreams can be a nuisance, but I have learned to make space for them.
From a young age, I swore to myself that I would never tell anyone about my imaginary world. In a way, I couldn’t have told anyone even if I’d wanted to, so powerful was the shame that sealed my lips. I went on in this way until my late twenties, when I reached a crisis. I was haunted by daydreams I couldn’t control, and trapped in a life I didn’t want. I turned to drugs, meditation, and therapy in the hopes of controlling my daydreams. In the end, none of those efforts worked in the way I’d hoped, though each was necessary in its own way.
Resigned to the fact that I’d never be able to control my daydreams, I began to explore them deliberately. I discovered that, far from useless mind-noise, my daydreams are a gold mine of insights into myself. I found that these bizarre images are me—though somehow they are not mine. The TV screen in my head was, in fact, a mirror. And so I stopped using my daydreams as an escape hatch out of my everyday experience, and started using them as a gateway into it.
Whenever I mustered up the courage to try and explain my daydreams to someone, I felt my explanations were inadequate. The other person usually seemed to have an explanation ready. They’re fan fiction, you should market them. They’re the unconscious, you should analyze them. They’re a dissociative disorder, you should treat them. They’re your past lives, you should honor them. The fact is that spirituality, philosophy, and modern medicine are all ill-equipped to explain the significance of compulsive daydreaming.
I began to write, out of necessity. My written explanations quickly took the form of fiction, again out of sheer necessity. Fiction did a pretty good job of showing you what it’s like to daydream as I do. However, it did not show you what it’s like to live with the daydreams, which are constantly thrusting themselves into my everyday experience like a swollen invisible organ. I felt that in order to make sense of the dreams you had to meet the dreamer, this person who is always trying to cover up her swollen imagination, who is so afraid of being seen in the real world that she created an imaginary world in which she could safely disappear.
And so I discovered that I had accidentally begun writing a memoir.
You are invited to look over my shoulder as I work. I post my essays in pairs. Each daydream story is followed by a non-fiction piece connecting that daydream back to my own life. The daydreams are not self-contained episodes, but installments in a long and complicated serial, so keep this in mind if you are starting in the middle. The early essays are not as well-written, so really, there’s no good place to start. You’ll just have to jump in and see what happens.
My story, like all good stories, is about conquering fear. It is not a how-to guide on how “daydream therapy” might help you conquer your fears. The way to conquer your fears is not to see what worked for someone else and copy it. It is to identify what you have always taken for granted as your purpose in life, and do the exact opposite. Do the opposite with such brash audacity as to utterly destroy the person you thought you were.
This site is an experiment driven by the conviction that most solvable problems can be solved by looking within oneself. The way forward is inward. Some might say that if we are to become who we wish to be, then we must first discover who we actually are. I disagree: this is not the first step. It is the only step. We simply discover ourselves again and again and again. We dig down deeper and deeper through the muck until eventually we find that we are no longer digging because we are trying to reach some transcendent destination, but because playing in the mud is the most transcendent joy there is.