Obsessive Daydreams: How to Create Another Life
Outside the double-hung window of the classroom, I watched as an energy beam ripped through the atmosphere and collided with the Earth, sending a shockwave across the town I grew up in, bending the surrounding trees to their limits. I imagined sliding the window open, climbing outside, and flying off toward the destruction. All my classmates, with their faces pressed against the glass, were speechless as I made my exit. This is just one life I lived. One life I lived each “B” day in high school, shortly after my geometry teacher started on about the day’s topic. I remained in a fugue state until my teacher called my name and asked for a response to the question I’d not heard over the sounds of my daydream.
When I think about the obsessions of my life thus far, I’m confronted by my daydreams. Back when I was in elementary school, I imagined being able to jump high enough to catch the pop flies in kickball or running faster than all the other kids in gym class, outlasting them in the PACER test. As an overweight child, athleticism dominated my daydreams, spurred on by the contradictory comments my father’s mother made to me as she fed me another slice of bundt cake.
Nowadays, my daydreams are far more practical, more grounded in reality. I scroll through Zillow and look at houses my partner and I could never afford. In these houses, I see us painting the rooms, cooking extravagant dinners together, lounging on the display furniture, no longer longing for a future where we don’t live paycheck to paycheck. I imagine my books lining the built-in bookshelves, a mid-century modern desk planted in the middle, and I see myself hunched over it, scribbling within a notebook. To daydream is to escape from the present reality, no matter how briefly. But sometimes, daydreaming too often can feel like an obsession—it’s hard to admit how often we daydream. “I spent my whole life daydreaming,” Leslie Jamison wrote in her essay “Dreamers in Broad Daylight: Ten Conversations.” “It embarrasses me to think of the tallying hours.”
Perhaps, it’s an obsession that doesn’t have to feel shameful. As Jamison later points out, both Sigmund Freud and D. W. Winnicott posed connections between the imagination of childhood, adult daydreaming, and the artist’s work, albeit with different interpretations: “daydreaming as a manifestation of the artist in everyone—a type of casual, everyday creative production—or daydreaming as a crutch, an adult form of thumb-sucking, a way of ducking away from the stress, uncertainty, or overwhelm of daily life.” For her, these two psychoanalysts created two distinctive functions of daydreams: generative fantasies and coping mechanisms.
It’s hard to say where my obsessive daydreaming falls between these two labels. At times, my daydreams were undoubtedly a form of escapism. But in that escapism, there were moments of untethered creativity. In this way, I find obsessive daydreaming both generative fantasies and coping mechanisms. I daydream as I browse Zillow. I create an imagined future for my partner, our family, what could be, while coping with the fact that we are both in debt and that that debt will continue to grow as she tries to reach a diagnosis for her illness, that I’ve lost my job for the second time in two years.
Octavia Butler was shy. So shy that she admits in her essay “Positive Obsession” that she was “afraid of most people, most situations.” There was no reason for this fear; it just existed within her. This made Butler believe she was “ugly and stupid, clumsy, and socially hopeless.” She tried to avoid the gaze of her peers. She wanted to remain out of sight. “I wanted to disappear.” This want can translate into daydreaming as a form of coping. Though she doesn’t mention daydreaming throughout her essay, it is in her desire to disappear, in her self-reassurances at a young age, that she’ll one day become a writer.
Despite her desire to disappear, Butler’s body did the opposite. She grew six feet tall. The boys around her ridiculed her for her height often, teased her for how she towered over them. To escape, she took to writing in her large, pink notebook. “I made myself a universe in it,” she wrote. “There I could be a magic horse, a Martian, a telepath… There I could be anywhere but here, any time buy now, with any people but these.” Is this form of escapism all that different from daydreaming? Could it be said that to daydream is to create a new reality? As a writer, with each new essay, each new story, each new poem, isn’t that what we’re trying to uncover?
According to Butler’s old Random House dictionary, obsession “is the domination of one’s thoughts or feelings by a persistent idea, image, desire, etc.” Once a thought continues to resurface, wedged deep within the folds of our brain, that’s when obsession begins. If you hum the same song each day for months, it’s because you’re obsessed with something about the music. If someone writes an entire essay about daydreaming, retraces conversations held about daydreams, and feels guilty about the hours lost to the countless unlived lives of daydreaming, that could be an obsession.
Often when we think about obsession, it’s met with a negative connotation. Characterized by imbalance, a one-sided nature, or a lack of depth, to be obsessed is to be flawed. When I think about obsession, I think about the countless conversations with my partner about how Americans idolize celebrities. I think about how I used to be obsessed with the idea of literary success and how I felt that success could find it at the bottom of a bottle. I think about the risks I didn’t take as I obsessively imagined each failure that came along with it, otherwise known as guilty-dysphoric daydreaming.
Obsession doesn’t have to be damning, though. This is particularly true when it comes to writing. For Butler, “Obsession can be a useful tool if it’s a positive obsession.” She specifies a caveat about her idea of “positive obsession,” where “using it is like aiming carefully in archery.” It’s not enough for a writer to simply have an obsession—what Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines as “a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling.” A writer must be able to channel that sensation. They must hold it at just the proper distance, so they don’t become lost within it. They must be able to step away from the writing, break free of the daydream, exist just enough in reality.
About Coty Poynter
Coty Poynter is the author of two poetry books. His most recent, Delirium: Collected Poems, was published by Bowen Press. His work has appeared in Black Fox Literary Magazine, Equinox, Grub Street, and Underwood Press. He lives in Baltimore with his partner, their cat Pudge, and a hodgepodge of plants. is the author of two poetry books. His most recent, Delirium: Collected Poems, was published by Bowen Press. His work has appeared in Black Fox Literary Magazine, Equinox, Grub Street, and Underwood Press. He lives in Baltimore with his partner, their cat Pudge, and a hodgepodge of plants.
