This topic was suggested by me for the weekly Friday LBC posts for this year. Quite what I had in my mind when I suggested it escapes me now and I am floundering to write something about it.
“Daydreaming is a short-term detachment from one’s immediate surroundings, during which a person’s contact with reality is blurred and partially substituted by a visionary fantasy, especially one of happy, pleasant thoughts, hopes or ambitions, imagined as coming to pass, and experienced while awake.”
~ Wikipedia.
Logically, the definition precludes dreaming as we understand it, ie, a thought process that occurs during our sleep. So, the detachment is while when one is wide awake!
I am not a great daydreamer now as my time is quite occupied during the day times. I am usually reading, or solving crossword puzzles, or being quite occupied with something or the other. I suppose that in my younger days, I was a daydreamer and in retrospect can say that some of the daydreams have come true while most have stayed as dreams only. I suppose that it would be the same for most of us.
I am now at an age where it is futile to daydream whereas I can live in my past to my heart’s content. And that observation brings me to an all time favourite piece of writing from a favourite author, with which I will close this post.
“The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him?
No, thank you,’ he will think. ‘Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, although these are things which cannot inspire envy.’ ”
From “Logotherapy in a Nutshell”, an essay”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
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