Throughout elementary school and high school, I spent much of my time staring out the window during class, living out all sorts of fantasies instead of paying attention to the boring reality of algebraic factoring or learning indirect object pronouns in español. My mind would fly around placing me in a castle in England or a mosque in Morocco, and then the teacher would snap me out of it by yelling, “Tracy! Quit daydreaming and pay attention!”
It was always a bit embarrassing, but what’s more embarrassing is that this fantasy life has followed me into adulthood, often leaving me confined inside my room imaging what I want my life to be like instead of actually going out into the real world to make it happen.
All alone, I’ll dream up passionate romances with dudes who don’t exist when I could be writing an article or reading an article or writing a book or reading a book, or hell, even binging on Netflix. Instead of filling my mind with ideas from other folks, I’ll lay on my bed all up in my head rendezvousing with the faceless man of my dreams on horseback, a la that hot scene in Laura Esquivel’s novel Like Water for Chocolate. It’s pathetic, really, and certainly embarrassing to admit. It’s even more embarrassing to admit that only very recently did I wake up out of the daydream to realize that I spend way too much time doing it.
Sometimes I wonder if the blame lies with my aberrant psyche or stupid Disney movies or Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales. When it comes to my many complex dreams about bad romances Charlotte Brontë certainly didn’t help, as Jane Eyre’s romance with Mr. Rochester put all sorts of ridiculous ideas about love into my head when I was just 15. It’s the perfect romance! Forget the S&M shit in Fifty Shades of Grey; I want a long and miserable, drawn-out unrequited sort of hell where the man of my desire ignores me for years until he discovers he’s been in love with me all along. And there’s no problem if I’ve had to cry ten thousand tons of tears—love is and always should be a battlefield. (I chalk up my asinine ideas about love to having an astrological chart full of four planets in Scorpio, including the love planet Venus.)
Stupidly, I went ahead and studied English in college, swallowing up more unrealistic garbage like Shakespeare and his sonnets, a bunch of Middle English love tales and reread books like Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice. I am a 37 year-old who believes that, in my recently-singled state, star-crossed lovers make the best partners.
And it’s not just the hot and steaming romances that grab my attention. When I was really young, I was obsessed with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and I also was a sucker for the Narnia books. For some reason, I thoroughly believed that behind all the little girl clothes hanging in my walk-in closet I’d find another world, a better world, a world where the brats at school didn’t bully me and the teachers didn’t chastise me for yip-yapping too much during the lesson on multiplication tables. And, come to think of it, I really did want to go head-to-head with the Jabberwocky, to face my fears and chop his nuts off.
Convinced that other worlds existed, I’d walk around our backyard hunting desperately for the rabbit hole down into Wonderland. I may not have found it in person, but I did manage to find it in my head, snug between the charcoal weber barbecue and the hose. I’d then spend the next few hours having conversations with the large roses and other flowers throughout the yard, flowers that didn’t talk back.
Recently I Googled daydreaming addiction just to see what was out there, and I found a fascinating article from the Atlantic on the topic asking the question: should excessive daydreaming be considered a psychiatric disorder? The author details the very complex fantasies that accompanied her from childhood through to adulthood. Essentially, 80% of her life took place in her head, to the detriment of both her studies and social life. Behavioral health specialists have dubbed this kind of fantasy life “maladaptive daydreaming.” It’s not in the DSM-V yet as a psychiatric disorder, but according to the author of the piece, it well should be.
I suppose it’s no surprise that one of the fundamental reasons for veering into this daydreaming is to escape painful realities, especially things like bullying, neglect from parents and physical, emotional or sexual abuse. I’m not sure if bullied is the proper term to describe the way the girls in my Brownie group made fun of me when I was in elementary school, but I do know I felt far safer alone. I was safer alone in my room with my imaginary worlds, stuffed animals and Cabbage Patch Kids (who I really believed were real). Often, I’d put in a cassette tape to my little ghetto-blaster (yes, I’m aging myself), and dream up some sort of choreography, usually to one of Madonna’s latest hits like Like A Prayer.
In my head, I was on stage in front of the whole school and all those girls who teased me would sit out there and watch as I performed the hottest routine. And here’s the most devastating part—I’ll still make up routines in my room while all alone, only now I’m choreographing belly dance routines. I supposed it isn’t too depressing, since I do perform every now and again and showcases with my dance classes and instructors, but there are some more over-the-top routines that I never do intend to perform on stage. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s okay to live out these dreams in the confines of my own room, but for some reason at this point in my life it just doesn’t seem healthy anymore, especially since there’s so much I want to accomplish, namely so many books to write.
This leads me to my current solution. Given all my romantic angst (and how convinced I am that I’ll never find my “one true love,” (which is the stupidest bullshit idea in the world in the first place). I’ve considered writing a bunch of cheesy young adult fantasy romance novels, just like the stories that fucked me up. I don’t want to give young girls the wrong ideas about love, but I do feel I should be channeling my imagination, this robust fantasy life, into something constructive. Because no matter how hard I try to rid myself of it, even when I’m working full-time and running around busy with many tasks, it’s still there. Like the residue from a bad dream, it just follows me around. It’s less a dream than a nightmare. Maybe if I can take it by the reins and give it some parameters, some rules, I can not only ease my heartsickness and manifest something, but I can maybe even make a drop of change while I’m at it.
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