Do you have fantasies? They don’t have to be scenes of the erotic: they can be innocuous images of living in the sun, winning the lottery, getting that promotion, falling in love, or receiving a prize.
The good news is that, if you do, you’re very human. One of the brain’s characteristics is to project beyond the present - into the past, into the future, into a world that doesn’t exist. It’s something we assume that snails or bats or pike don’t do. Like their bodies, their minds are tethered to the now, incapable of reflection, imagination or fantasy. Yet without budging from our armchairs we humans can travel through time and space limitlessly. Our capacity to fantasise means that during our life we can live many lives.
The bad news is that having fantasies means you’re unhappy - according to Freud, at least. To fantasise is to concede that you live a life in which your wishes remain unfulfilled; dreaming about fulfilling them is a symptom of discontent. If he’s right, there must be a lot of unhappy people. But what about those who’ve made the dream come true?
To live the dream is to close the gap between fantasy and reality. Which sounds obvious, but put it more starkly and we’re talking about removing the need for fantasy, and taking away the temptation to think about other lives you could be living, or indeed anything beyond the present moment. Just as to fulfill your potential is to lose it, so living the dream means the dream no longer lives. It doesn’t need to: it’s served its purpose in delivering the life you longed for. To live the dream is to kill it.
Unless, that is, living the dream involves an altered mental state, in which you really do feel as if you’re dreaming. Things are so wonderful you can’t believe it. In this case, it’s not the dream that dies, but your sense of reality. On the one hand, this is good: ‘reality’ has become a byword for all that’s inconvenient or vexing, so you’re not going to cry at letting it go. On the other hand, losing touch with reality means your dream has in it a hint of madness.
Once you start to look at it, living the dream gets complicated. Better to live the life.
Robert Rowland Smith’s new book, Driving with Plato: The Meaning of Life’s Milestones is coming soon from Profile.
Image: Issaco Curelli
Reality is a fantasy.
Posted by: David Jones | November 08, 2010 at 10:13 AM
One of the smartest articles I've read in a long time. I like it a lot. Nice piccie too.
Posted by: Richard Philip Witt | November 05, 2010 at 02:26 PM