The Moment is Overrated: In Defense of Daydreams

Years ago, a friend told me to unfollow my college ex on Facebook. “Stop letting him live rent-free in your mind,” she said. “Live your real life.”

The phrase “living rent-free in your mind” is relatively clever, I’ll admit. If I’d thought of it myself, I would have tweeted it. But I don’t agree with its implication. It suggests that the object of a fantasy is the sole benefactor of the arrangement. That your fantasies don’t serve you. As a woman who’s been indulging her fantasies (what others might call “daydreams”) for decades, I know that’s not true.

In my most recent favorite book, Everything’s Fine, Josh—a confident hedge-fund bro—owns up about his fantasies to the object of them. As they’re hooking up, he explains exactly how his fantasy about her evolved over five years. How the fantasy and the reality became one, and how he was in love with her. I read this passage agape at his boldness, humiliated for him, a fictional character. I’d sooner tell you what I masturbate to than tell you the subject matter of my fantasies.

I won’t tell you what I fantasize about, but I can tell you how I fantasize. Basically, I put on music and throw myself into some alternate scenario. I can walk, or run, or sit on a train, but at long as I’m moving, I can fantasize. Sitting—absolutely not. Sitting, I am living my real life. Real life happens on my couch.

I can also tell you why I fantasize. Fantasies are an escape. They’re something to slip into when I’m bored or upset or need to think of my life as something other than what it is. I’ve been sober about five years, and when I don’t want to live the life I have, I’ve got three options: sleep, fantasize, or change. I’m (usually) too caffeinated for #1, (usually) too lazy for #3.

My fantasies are elaborate. I’ll keep the same one for months at a time, continuing to add details to the world, until perhaps the story is fully told, and I start a new one from scratch. They’re a mixture of romantic and professional and personal and familial. In all of them, something happens that compels me to abandon the life I’d been living, and, more importantly, abandon all the insecurities and neuroses and complications and obligations of my actual existence. It’s friction-free. It’s happily ever after.

If my fantasies are SIMs, the computer game, then social media is the part where I’m designing my players: a chance to build a custom personality for them with scraps of facts. I don’t feel good about this. It feels wrong to turn someone else into a character. If not unethical, at least juvenile. And I’ve been on the other end: sitting on dates with men who knew my Twitter before they knew me, who thought they had the whole story. When a stranger expects you to behave a certain way, it’s not only obvious, it’s also dehumanizing, in the least dramatic sense of the term. I don’t feel stripped of all my human rights and dignity. I just feel like to them, I’m not a person, I’m an idea.

I’m embarrassed to fantasize. It feels immature and ungrateful. I have a nice life; I should be able to live it as it is. Sometimes, to ease my embarrassment, I’ll dip my toes into finding out who fantasizes the way I do. I’ll ask a friend if they ever imagine they’re part of a high-profile sex scandal, and then play out the next several months as it comes to light. “Yeah, me neither,” I’ll say quickly.

I used to both worry and hope that I’d get too old to fantasize. On the one hand, we all want to magically outgrow our bad habits. On the other, the idea scared me. Even though the fantasies weren’t grounded in reality, the ability to dream of a happier future was a useful one. My fantasies proved I was an optimist. Optimism is, in itself, a fantasy. A way to mentally project yourself into a better future.

I didn’t need to worry. Absent any effort, my fantasies evolved with my age. I no longer picture myself going back in time to live out my dreams of being on the set of Harry Potter, like I did in my late 20s. I now have fantasies appropriate for a woman in her 30s. And when I hit my fifties, oh my. It’s going to be all Under the Tuscan Sun all the time.

Despite my embarrassment, I never tried to give up my daydreams. I’d had significantly worse habits, hadn’t I? Fantasies are innocuous, aren’t they? I deserve something, don’t I?

Two years ago, I met a man who lived in another state. I fell fast; within a few months, it was easy to see myself living there. Building a new life in a new city. Leaving everything behind. And in retrospect, of course it was easy to picture giving up my whole life to start anew, for love. It’s exactly what my fantasies had trained me for, for years.

It didn’t work out. The end of our relationship was simultaneously devastating and a very minor change in the way I actually lived. We weren’t in the same place, anyway. I wasn’t hearing from him enough; he wasn’t making enough of a dent in my life. I truly believe that if you are excited to receive a text from your partner, you need to breakup with them. They’re withholding. And so was he. Which was why things went awry.

He was so barely there that I’m not sure it’s fair to say I missed him. The more pressing problem was the return to myself. To my life. Nothing quite like waking up in your own bed to make you realize you live there.

My fantasies had propelled a relationship with a weak foundation. In the slightly-edited words of Maren Morris, “when the bones aren’t good, the rest don’t matter.” (the way she wrote it is also true, though). But they hadn’t acted alone; I was the enabler. I’d filled in all the cracks in our relationship with the idea of him.

So, in the wake of that breakup, I made a resolution. A resolution I’m reflecting on now, as resolution season is upon us. I decided to live my life. To make the necessary changes so my present path would be both feasible and satisfactory. To not fantasize about throwing it all away and starting over.

I didn’t know where to begin. Fortunately, a starting point soon presented itself. My housing situation changed; I needed to move. I wanted to live alone, and I accepted that I couldn’t afford to in the neighborhood I’d been in. So, I moved to a part of NYC that’s basically the suburbs. After that, I accepted that the payoff from some of my larger writing projects was years in the future. I took a few social media consulting jobs. And I went on Hinge, I met a man, and I got a cat. Cats are the most realistic animal you can have; I won’t explain.

I continued to fantasize. In recent months, though, they’ve started to make me feel dirty. For the first time, I’m building a concrete future with someone else. My fantasies feel unfaithful to our collective dreams. Our relationship is healthy. So healthy, in fact that I wouldn’t consider our discussions of the next decades of our lives to be fantasies at all. They’re just plans.

But plans are not the same as fantasies. Plans require details and spreadsheets and confronting the exact truth of present, to find a way to transform it into a desired future. Fantasies allow you to circumvent reality entirely. Plans require tasks like looking up the cost of things and imagining under what circumstances I’d get a 9-5 again. Plans are intentions to make things happen, which means that you can fail at them. Fantasies are failure-proof. You cannot run out of money in a fantasy. Fantasies are socialist. Besides, planning the future with another person is scary. I have a history of running away from scary things. That’s why I started fantasizing so much to begin with. Anyway, it’s no wonder my plans couldn’t take the place of my fantasies.

Humans have a difficult time anticipating what we want. Or, at least, that’s what people say. Before Steve Jobs, no one thought anyone would wear headphones outside their houses. Now, no one wears their raw ears. Famed Antisemite Henry Ford once said that if you asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. That would have saved untold lives and environmental destruction, but you get the idea.

I’ve found this to be true in my own life. For example, I never wanted a cat, and then, as a matter of circumstance, I acquired Brian:

I never fantasized about having a cat. Now, I often fantasize about getting a second cat.

I don’t think my fantasies teach me what I want. But maybe they teach me how to want. How to play out an unknown scenario. If I weren’t already in the habit of slipping into an alternate reality, would I be able to discuss the merits of daycare vs an au pair with my partner? Or would it be so scary that I would break down the moment the subject came up? (in this case, it’s a “yes-and” situation).

To plan a future in concrete terms requires more than logistics. It requires a belief that a future me will be better than a present me. Or at the very least, different. This, too, I had been practicing. bell hooks once said that “people with healthy self-esteem do not need to create pretend identities.” But what about those of us without it? What if the alternative identities support us as we get there? What if we need to know how to see our future selves as an upgraded version before we can recognize that our present self is that upgraded version? Or at least…an upgraded version. Or at least…a different version….with different features. You get the idea.

Fantasies teach me how to leave my real life. This comes with risks, but it’s not all downside. The future isn’t real life either—making a plan for the future is a fantasy. It’s a hypothetical, a fiction. Without my fantasies, I wouldn’t have been able to plan the future with someone. I wouldn’t have been able to see a path forward so clearly with someone who wanted to walk that path with me. And most importantly, if I hadn’t spent decades obsessively training myself to leave, I wouldn’t be able to recognize when it’s worth it to stay.

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