Daydreams are questions to live with

December 20, 2022 2:02 PM

"Daydreams aren’t questions to be answered, but questions to live with, dangerous only when they stay static. Even in our best lives, our daydreams allow us to retain secret lives that no one else can access or touch. They are the ultimate privacy: the thing that remains secret even inside our closest intimacies, perhaps the thing that exists in order to remain private within those intimacies. The things we imagine doing are more private than any of the things we’ve done."--Dreamers in Broad Daylight: Ten Conversations, by Leslie Jamison (Astra)
posted by MonkeyToes (5 comments total)

Thanks for posting this - I love it so much! As a lifelong daydreamer, I really appreciate how thoughtful and thorough she is in this piece. Once, when we were in college, one of my friends told me she was so angsty that she kept getting into fights with her imaginary boyfriends, which I still think about, decades later.
posted by tangosnail at 2:48 PM on December 20, 2022 [5 favorites]

Whoa, Monkey Toes, what a great article! Some great quotes, even Freud shows up.
posted by Oyéah at 3:12 PM on December 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

If you like this you will also likely enjoy at least some of her other work—I’m partial to The Empathy Exams, but then the title essay takes place in my hometown and hospital.
posted by newrambler at 8:00 PM on December 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

I spent a lot of time reading Carl Jung in my early twenties. He stated that day dreaming was good for exercising the active imagination and contributed to good mental health.
Some of the North Sufi schools such as Naqshbandi advocate active visualisation for spiritual development.
This thinking seems to have gone out of fashion and I've stopped following it in recent years.
posted by Narrative_Historian at 12:24 AM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I had this tab open so I wouldn't lose track of it and finally got around to reading the essay this morning. Wow! I too am a lifelong daydreamer and so much of it resonated. During the height of pandemic, I got very caught up in an ongoing daydream that started to feel like it was pulling me away from real life too much. I went cold turkey on it to feel rebalanced (but like in the essay, there is so much effort needed for resisting a daydream) and only occasionally revisit it - it's become as much a memory as things that actually happened. Weird.

The other topic the piece brought to mind was Ralph Phillips from Looney Tunes, another sweet daydreamer.
posted by Sweetie Darling at 8:00 AM on December 22, 2022