Daydream believer

I’m sure I hadn’t heard anyone speak openly of it for years. Probably because it’s one of those private things people do, but don’t talk about. Then within days of each other, two unconnected people – a child and an adult – mentioned it, and I felt a twinge of regret. Somewhere along the line I seem to have lost the art of daydreaming.

Maybe my adult censor – like a jealous landowner – curbed my mind’s right to roam. Of course, It doesn’t help that Walter Mitty has become a byword for dangerous fantasist. And nowadays with everyone seeking mindfulness or mindlessness, what chance does daydreaming have? How can our minds range across pastures familiar and new if we are either always to be ‘in the moment’, or in constant upload mode?

And yet surely daydreaming is playfulness for the mind, and those harmless reveries we lose ourselves in have a role to play in our general well being? So perhaps, like many other things that make us feel good, it needs practice.

Minds naturally wander, right? It’s just as an adult they’re more likely to stray into the worry department or get off at the planning floor. In mindfulness meditation we’re invited to gently lead our wandering thoughts back to the breath. A daydreaming practice would encourage the mind to leave behind ‘the moment’. No daydream would be too ordinary or too fanciful. So a daydream in which you are simply sitting in your favourite armchair looking out at the garden, a glass of wine in one hand, a book in the other, is good enough – it could be a life saver if you’re only ten minutes into a three hour audit meeting. And if you find yourself, arms aloft, crossing the finishing line of that marathon you’ve been wanting to do for years, give yourself a rousing cheer.

When your daydreaming, at any point in the waking day you can be anyone, go anywhere. And nobody need ever know. You will never have to see your daydream founder or turn to dust as it goes through the mill of language. It will be forever pure and perfect and yours.