Daydreams, Dreams, Nightmares, Situation Planning
Have not researched this topic at all so it is all off the wall.
I have read that daydreams are fine as long as we don’t take them too seriously. It seems daydreams are just pleasant thoughts as to what would be nice if we had different abilities, personalities, and attitudes. I might day dream that the most beautiful person in the world marries me and stuns everyone. Or that I am a star athlete, etc.
Dreams occur while we are asleep. I have no idea what they mean. Most of my dreams are more like nightmares, usually I am lost in some situation and trying to find my way out. Maybe I have pleasant dreams but they just don’t wake me up like a bad dream might. There doesn’t seem to be any sense to these nightmares.
Daydreams interest me the most. Here we are making a conscious decision to see ourselves in a different light. I think I mostly daydream as a means to put myself to sleep seeing myself as something admirable in a way that I am not and never will be. Am pretty sure people have different daydreams depending on their real life status. I don’t think I ever daydream of being rich or powerful or brilliant. Nor do I ever daydream about being a crook of some sort, or a con artist, and that sort of illicit stuff.
If we lie in bed and think about different outcomes in some current aspect of our life I don’t think this is daydreaming but more problem solving by trying to imagine different outcomes. Sure it may involve visualizing our winning some battle in life and everyone congratulating us, or seeing the losers pout, but things related to real life battles don’t seem should be viewed as day dreaming.
It appears the most plausible reason for sleep is that during sleep our brain cleans up accumulated clutter of some sort, much like certain programs that we may run through our computer do. The result is a more efficient faster computer. It seems also true that most people, absent a good night’s sleep, don’t feel rested and on top of things the next day. The amount of sleep and getting to sleep seem to be significant problems for a lot of people. Many of the drugs available to help us get to sleep may do so but the next day it doesn’t often feel like it was restful sleep. And most drugs used to get us to sleep run the risk of making sleep more difficult in the long run.
Today we are inundated with all sorts of methods to make us feel contented even if our real world has little in it to be contented about. Some of these methods are mental gimmicks and some involve drugs which affect how we feel about our lives. We have the ability now to measure just how stressed our bodies are with drug testing for the level of stress hormones in our blood, but we rarely do this, and I suspect for this reason: the cause for the chronic stress is most likely not easy to correct. To me, this is a big mistake. When humans put their minds to it, a lot of difficult conundrums can be solved, either somewhat or completely. Right now the choice for many adults and children, suffering from chronic stress, is to engage in mental gimmicks which help them pretend they are contented with their lives or take drugs to either stimulate our pleasure centers, elevate our emotional energy level, or simply change the way we feel about our problems. When people are stupid enough to suggest the cure for drug addiction is a phrase—“Just say no”—this approaches absurdity. How do you convince someone to stop doing something which makes them feel better? For any real change we need change what there is about their life which makes them feel the pain of the way in which they are living their lives.
But as usual I stray, and often to the same damn themes. Then again, daydreams are essentially another way to experience some pleasure from life situations which we just don’t have the inherent ability to achieve. I would guess some people daydream a lot more than others. Sometimes our daydreams change as our life changes. I used to daydream about winning particular races, but once I was good enough to win some races those daydreams ceased.
I think love, at least when young and the pursuit of love is full steam ahead, there is a lot of daydreaming about just with whom we might have a chance to have a love/sexual relationship. Naturally, just about everything to do with love and sex is a hodgepodge of diverse feelings, the one area of most people’s lives which has the least solid footing, the least logic, and the greatest likelihood of ending up changing with times for reasons which are rarely understood with any clarity. Few love relationships are the same as in their earlier days. I doubt many people spend as much time daydreaming about their spouse as they did early in the relationship. A different kind of glue holds the relationship together, and often it does not hold together. The preacher lied when he implied God was involved in putting the marriage together.
It seems, again with no expertise here, that sleep dreams are not all that important in terms of having a lot of relevance to our actual lives, that nightmares may or may not have some relevance but are far more likely to wake us up when they occur, that daydreams are healthy as long as they are treated in the same fashion as watching a good movie—the difference being that with a daydream we have written the script and we need remember that it is fiction. Mulling current situations in life over are simply conscious attempts to make sense out of, and plan actions involving certain aspects of our life at the time.
Some daydreams don’t last very long. When I first was succeeding in getting Riva the horse to be my friend and was getting some notoriety for having succeeded in this respect, I would daydream about what situations would enhance my notoriety here even more. Having Riva charge at me, then leap up into the air and come screeching to a halt inches from me, raise her head and whinny as loud as she could was pure showoff on my part. When I ran she liked to chase me but Matt managed to get me to cease doing this: “you don’t play those kind of games with a thousand pound horse” he scowled. It is probably natural for us to like to show off; after all, there are not really that many people, so talented in so many ways, where showing off gets boring. I suspect there are millions of people going through life with nary a chance to ever show off. They will have to rely on daydreaming.
At any rate, happy daydreams. A certain amount of pretending may protect our sanity, a mental state rather fragile in these current times.
