When I was younger and felt less at home in the world, one of my escapes was to wrap my awareness into daydreams. These dreams could be quite elaborate and even serial, typically around relationships I longed to build with people I found attractive or admirable but felt too inadequate to approach in person. Sometimes these were very deep, long, reflective conversations; other times they were relationship arcs: how we’d finally begin to speak, the rising action of our connection, special moments together, even the ways we’d finally break apart.
In a sense, these fantasies were a balm to loneliness and anxiety, yet they took on an agency of their own. There were parts of me that actively resisted presence in life, finding it disappointing and demoralizing in contrast to the mental reality in which I had control.
Except—I didn’t really have control. In my mind I could make these images sock puppets of my inner self talk to each other, but it was difficult to pull my mind out of the dream and back into dealing with my daily life. The mental theatre of life was missing aliveness, spontaneity, fulfillment.
This is an example of what I’d call a “coping strategy,” a habit that helps smooth the sharp and painful edges of painful reality. Coping strategies are useful, and they are limited in that they do not help us to do the work of transforming that reality. Often coping strategies may actively resist the changes of life, which tends to require a certain amount of experiencing pain and discomfort to ensure transformative action is thorough, effective, and includes as many of our parts as possible.
And there are times when coping is a perfectly good move. There are certain experiences in life that cannot be transformed all at once, or are so overwhelming that we do not have the space or capacity to feel and transform. When we are trapped in a relationship, a home, or a country by an abusive person, a certain measure of coping is necessary to get through the awfulness while we strive to find an escape.
But a coping strategy also contains within it truth about ourselves. Lately I find myself falling back into that pattern of getting lost in my imagination. Sometimes that lostness means having intense and irritable arguments with people in my mind that I would never have in person. Sometimes it means imagining relationships or experiences that are deeply unlikely.
Along with that, I strive to also practice what I’d call “Self-care,” which are the practices that bring presence and awareness into life and let that awareness illuminate the inner and outer work that reduces suffering. Self-care is sitting meditation, calm conversations with our loved ones about difficult relationship patterns, tarot readings, baths, and walks. Self-care is also showing up to protests, challenging unfair working conditions, educating one’s self about one’s history and material realities.
Self-care is also simply being alive, feeling one’s feelings, and not looking at life as something that requires fixing or salvation. My daydreaming, I think, has a touch of the salvation within it.
Parts of me have struggled, like all of us, with the grief, stress, and enormous contraction in my life due to stay at home orders and pandemic safety measures. When there is no clear finish line, staying in the stress of it begins to feel intolerable. I can endure much when I know it will end, particularly when I know I have control over how it ends. And, though I do know this will end because all pandemics end, not knowing for sure when has been painful. So it makes sense I’d start escaping into fantasy.
In my younger years the romantic notion that I kept envisioning was that somehow I’d befriend a person, a wise person, or find a lover who would finally both see me and save me. See in me all the potential and goodness I had to offer, and save me from my self-loathing and self-defeating habits. Eventually, however, I started to find the wisdom that I was doing that work for myself—I was cultivating an inner capacity to see myself through this imaginal work, to see my merits and strengths but also my avoidances.
Dreaming is a beautiful practice of stepping outside of the limitations of ego and envisioning other worlds. By necessity those worlds cannot exist in this one in the way we imagine. Imagination is a powerful engine. In some esoteric traditions, it is the capacity through which we encounter beings and energies not of the material world.
Yet it’s all mixed up with our personal unconscious. Some clients tell me they imagine having conversations with me between sessions. What they are doing is talking to a part of themself whose nature and capacity is expressed by whatever it is they symbolically associate with me.
In a sense, we can look at dreams in this way, whether they are sleeping or waking dreams. Many dreams are whisperings from parts of us who we do not recognize as parts of us. They appear in monstrous costumes, or like friends and ex-lovers, or colleagues or family members, or spiritual beings. Perhaps these fantasies show us something we long for ourselves that we’re not ready to claim, or could become ready to claim. Perhaps they’re ways of testing and playing out patterns to imagine how they unfold.
And, in some spiritual traditions, we may dream of the real beings that are not merely psychological internalizations. There are dreams I have in which a person tells me a message, and I relay that to the real person in waking life, and that message has meaning for them. There are dreams I have that prefigure future events that happen later—rarely in a way that’s useful to avoid the events, but often in a way that helps me work through them more quickly. There are dreams I have had in which I am certain I encountered the real person’s psyche, and dreams in which I am certain it was not the real person, and none of these certainties are verifiable in an experimental design.
Dreams are softer and more liquid than goals. A goal is so concrete and fiery. It pushes you in a clear direction and brings with it the experience of obstacles, successes, and failure. Dreaming flows, expands, deepens, and reveals. Now may be a good time to dream, and to see what the dreaming means.
What does the dream pull you toward? Truth telling? Adventure? Risk? Playful experiences? Possibilities of living you’d not allowed yourself to consider? What if these dreams were not about escape, but about planting seeds that you may choose to nurture?