Do we daydream anymore?
I’ve been wondering about that in the last few days after a conversation with a close friend in which we mutually confessed our penchant for daydreaming.
My fear is that daydreaming is a lost art. But perhaps that is just a solipsistic point of view—just because we generally don’t see other people daydreaming, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
I want to write here about why daydreaming is so important to me, why I fear it may be a phenomena in decline and why my daughter gives me some hope for the future.
(And, at this point, I have to repeat one of my favorite jokes: Lady Ottoline Morrell once told Bertrand Russell that she couldn’t understand why more people are not solipsists.)
I daydream a lot. In fact one of the—many—reasons I can’t work with another person in the room is that I don’t want to be observed day dreaming, that is, doing what looks like nothing.
I daydream about all sorts of things.
I daydream about abstract ideas. The single most original idea I’ve ever had—the one truly beautiful idea I’ve had—came to me when I was daydreaming as I was driving down route 206 in Netcong, New Jersey. As it came to me, I swerved into a Burger King so that I could immediately write it down and almost had an accident while doing so. That philosophical daydream was partly verbal. I kept running a dilemma in my head about two different ways of thinking about human action and desires. Each one ultimately ran into certain problems but I couldn’t figure out an alternative. Then I started focusing on an image of a circle rotating on an arrow. That image had been in my head for a month. A drawing of it was on my blackboard in my office at the Institute for Advacned Study. I had sensed that the drawing pointed to a solution to the dilemma. But I couldn’t figure out what those images meant—I couldn’t put it into words—until I had that flash of insight on Route 206.
(I’m a terrible driver most of the time because I daydream while driving. But when road conditions are really bad and I start to concentrate you are better off with me driving than almost anyone you know.)
I daydream about our world, about our political community and how it might be better arranged. Again, my daydreams are not all that focused. I worry ideas and themes, rehearse words and images, create mash-ups of different ways of thinking about our world until something new emerges. All my work in political philosophy, which mostly deals with thinking about how our world might be different, comes from my daydreams.
I daydream about the work I’m doing now—about giving speeches, talking to members of Congress, holding coalition meetings. Those daydreams are not so much visual but sonic in nature. I daydream about words I might say but even more about a tone I might set. I imagine themes I might use or the cadences of a speech I might give. I search for phrases that the emotional impact of my theme. When I was a teacher I daydreamed about how a class would go, about how I might move through a text. Those daydreams were not about specific ideas but about how the order I might discuss chunks of the text or how I might play one text off against another.
I daydream about what it might be like to live somewhere else…in London, in Carmel, in San Francisco in any of the places that have attracted me over the years.
I daydream about sex. I don’t know where the idea that men think about sex every ten seconds comes from and I’m totally sure it isn’t true. There is so much else to think about if you have any kind of interest in the world around you. But I daydream about sex often, about things I’ve done and things I’d like to do. About positions and combinations and permutations.
But sex daydreams are usually not entirely separable from love daydreams. In my philosophical work I argue that sex gets it power for human beings because of love, not the other way around. And that’s clearly what my daydreams have shown me. I daydream about people in general and about friends but mostly about lovers: mostly real, but also potential and impossible. I daydream about conversations I might have with my friends and about things we might do together. I imagine lives together with people in different locations. When I was younger I daydreamed a lot about what it might be like to be with this or that person. I found that falling in love actually stifled those daydreams for some time. Really being in love for the first time in my life was so powerful an experience that for a long while it left little room for daydreaming.
For a few years in my early twenties I daydreamed about men as well women. Living in an slowly enlightening time, and having read Freud, I was curious about how deep my heterosexuality went. It occurred to me then that sexual orientation wasn’t really about who might give you sexual pleasure. It was about who you might be able to love—and who you would want to have around in the room with you after having an orgasm. I concluded that I could never love a man the way I could love a woman.
Daydreams as an in-between state
Writing as I’ve done here makes my daydreams seem more focused than they really are. But my daydreams are useful primarily because they are not focused but float from idea to image to sound to idea to tone and then back again with very little direction and purpose. They are often about something–some philosophical or political and social or person concern or some aspect of my life or relationships that have engaged me. But my daydreams don’t aim at solving problems or issues but in immersing myself in them and letting various perspectives and points of views, different ideas, images, and sounds bang into each other in a more or less haphazard way. And this immersion in half-formed notions barely intelligible thoughts swirling around and running one another leads, more often than not to the emergence of new ideas and thoughts that are valuable mainly because I let them come to me. (I’ve written more about how important it is to be receptive and welcoming to ideas as well as to political movements and love here.) Because I let myself go during them, my daydreams are experiments that enable me to generate and explore ideas and actions and desires. They have allowed me to consider alternatives and test out certain paths of actions or circumstances in which I might want to put myself. They have enabled me to figure out how to do certain things. And they have given me confidence that I can pull off what I’m attempting to do.
They are an state in between focused directed attention and unconsciousness, one that lets me tap into currents in my life and their connection to currents in the world around me that I otherwise might have missed.
Daydreams as relief and promise of intelligibility
And they have been a welcome relief from the trying business of everyday life, from what Wordsworth called the “heavy and weary weight of all this unintelligible world.” The world of my dreams is sometimes opaque, sometimes dazzling, sometimes cloudy, and sometimes perplexing. But, there the world always offers a promise of ultimate intelligibility.
Perhaps daydreaming is, for me, a kind of meditation and a non-pharmacological way to control my moods. There is no question I daydream more when my personal or professional situation is difficult. Daydreaming, along with a beautiful view of the Alaska range helped deal with a great deal of loneliness and professional stress during my last year in Alaska.
Do other people still daydream?
Do other people still daydream? I sure hope so. But I worry about whether the busyness of our lives leaves room for daydreams. I suspect I learned to write and work as fast as I do in part to have some time left for daydreams. But do most people still have that time? And with all the stories around us—in newspapers, TV, book, movies, comic books—do we have imaginative space left for daydreams? And porn must be the ultimate killer of many daydreams. How can people explore their own sexuality in daydreams if porn leaves nothing to the imagination? How can you daydream about loving someone and about love moving one to sex if sex is always front and center?
Some hope and a hope
But I see some hope in my sixteen year old daughter who is a dreamer—and thus is sometimes disorganized and sometimes finds it hard to be disciplined and focused, just as I was at her age and sometimes still am. I sometimes think she’s watches too much TV and is on the computer too much. But she is a great reader—and reading more than any other art encourages daydreams because we read at our own pace and can take the time to imagine a book beyond that which we immediately find in the words it contains. My daughter also leaves time—sometimes its seems (but almost certainly not) too much time—for thinking and what looks like daydreaming.
At least I hope she does. Daydreaming may take time I could be using for other things. But I’m convinced it is critical to human creativity. And, just so it’s clear that I’m not arguing, as Americans tend to do, that something that looks like a barrier to productivity is in fact a spurt to it, I’ll add that it is critical to our capacity to reflect on our lives. And it’s fun, too. Daydreaming has made my life—a life I enjoy and cherish immensely—much of what it is.
Daydreaming is something many of us do secretly. So given the evidence of my daughter, and the importance it has played my life, I’m not ready to join those who despair about our busy culture and panoply of electronic devices that fill the cracks in time which allow for and perhaps encourage daydreams. Until we know better, I’m going to assume that the time between–the time in which I revel in daydreams–is one that most other human beings love and appreciate as well and that my secret life of daydreaming is something I share and will share with many, many other people in a double sense–that we all day dream and that, in doing so, we open ourselves to the influence and perspectives of others and our time.