Do you Daydream ?
It feels so real. You could hear your heartbeat ringing in your ears and feel the sweat dripping from your chin. India needs four runs to win off the last ball and you are to face the final ball. The next second you are in a success meet of your recent blockbuster movie. You enjoy the spotlight and giving a rousing speech. Suddenly, you are waltzing with your spouse in a college get together party. That was such a moment to savor. Only then you realize that you are sitting in your room and staring at the wall. You were interrupted by a Brownian moving ant on your arm. You brush it aside with a heavy sigh. It has been less than two minutes that you got distracted. You were working on something else.
Photo Courtesy: Jeslyn
The above-mentioned daydream pattern is not alien to us. The dreams and patterns might have changed but the phenomenon has remained from childhood. Daydreams are part of our lives. From the point of view of an economist, it is one of the factors which ‘hamper’ production and ‘measures’ need to be implemented to improve the ‘efficiency’ of the human to improve ‘productivity’. I am pretty sure that you saw Adam Smith nod from your left. But the problem of daydreams is beyond economics. It can be extremely stressful.
Remember the last time you doubted whether you locked your house properly, you being unsure after roller-coasting through traffic about that your file in your bag, whether you added salt after you have finished cooking, whether you missed something when it was staring right at your face. Well, you have got day dreaming to blame and nothing else. It is one of those things in life which we fight hard to stop but happens over and over and over and… over again.
Setting aside the economist argument that daydreams lessen GDP (Gross Domestic Product) they raise a lot of questions when viewed through different prisms. Do we practice willful ignorance when we ‘intentionally’ create hypothetical situations which we know are never possible? The answer being a straightforward ‘yes’, it reveals the current pathetic state of what we call ‘living’. It simply means that though the current state of living had given us the certainty of the basic necessities of life (to a considerable population – definitely not Syrians) the mind craves for things which it doesn’t have. Things you want might change but dreaming does not.
Or are we asking the wrong questions? Do all mammals daydream? Does a lion which has gone without food for a week, dream about drinking blood? Or will we ever know? Deciding not to involve other animals on this subject, does it really matter that we look at daydreams and wonder why we do it? I am pretty sure that we all try to reduce doing that but we can’t stop it simply because it was a habit strongly entrenched in childhood.
Photo Courtesy: Georgie Pauwels
Take this line from late lyricist Na.Muthukumar, “தூரத்தில் தெரியும் வெளிச்சம் பாதைக்கு சொந்தம் இல்லை” – The path does not own the light in its sight. Daydreams are this virtual world which we could see but never reach. The light could never be owned but at least it brightens a gloomy life. In spite of all the shortcomings of day dreams I have to admit that they can definitely synthesize pleasure which is always in short supply.
Photo Courtesy:
(1)Jeslyn
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