is fair to say we are more lucid while daydreaming. We have much more control over the outcomes of our daydreams, and often daydreams are categorized as fantasies, self-imposed hallucinations that model our desires. (Too much is made of the content of daydreams, and more attention should be paid to their origins; it is not what we daydream of, but how and why these daydreams arise, that is truly important.) When daydreams are factored in, I am forced to admit that most of my life is spent dreaming, of either ecstatic incoherences or an ideal future, thus removing me almost completely from reality. I didn’t realize how much I daydreamed until recently. My daydreams gained my attention as I was trying to forge a friendship with someone I had known for a long time. As the foundations of the friendship were laid, a series of typical excursions to cafes and shops, I found myself thinking about the friendship more and more. I envisioned the rudiments of the friendship being erected into a grand, ornate edifice, decorated with mutual interests and excitements, echoing with profound and probing conversation. Like all great architecture, I dreamed that the friendship would be eternal, or as enduring as four human hands could make it, outlasting the caprices of the world and asymmetries of experience, dying only when we ourselves met our end. This seems outrageous to me now, and I knew all along, in some subconscious sepulcher, that it was outrageous, ridiculous, silly. But that didn’t prevent me from dreaming, however pathetic or desperate or naive it may have been. My dreams were filled with closeness, and she (or the embodiment of an idea that I imagined her to be) listened to my thoughts and wasn’t turned away by them. And, even more miraculous than that, she understood them, however slipshod or inarticulate. Her thoughts, her secret wonderings, remained vague, even vaguer than the dreams themselves. It comforts me a little that I didn’t want her to be a specific type of person, and I never wanted her to like the same things I do. I didn’t expect her to have read Dostoevsky or Nietzsche. What I expected was much more unrealistic: I expected to be understood. It seems to me now that I want so badly to be understood that I conflate being understood with being loved. Much of the time, I feel like an alien amongst my peers, and therefore I have a tendency to act like one. I want to belong to someone rather than something. Or, stated less strongly, I want to belong with someone, I want to feel known and valued in the mind and presence of another human being. But none of us belong, not really. We’re all runaways, trying to escape our prison of gray matter and bone. When I was a child, my daydreams usually involved a person who I admired standing next to me, listening to what I had to say, looking me Page 40
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