Like all 18-26 year olds in our contemporary society, I spend far too much time dialing into the ever flowing information waterfall that is the internet. Every morning in the 10 minutes between my first alarm and my snooze alarm, I sit silently beneath my covers with my eyes glued to a 5-by-3 inch screen, scrolling through miles of unimportant information (Beyonce did what?). In elevators and on trains, 10 minutes into a movie and on the 10-minute walk from my job to my house, I can be found scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Naturally, I’d like to blame all of my inattention on technology, as would the army of baby boomers marching to the beat of “Technology is killing our children!” However, I believe that my lack of attentiveness stems from a problem that is much more idiosyncratic, and incredibly internal: I am a pathological daydreamer.
I understand that most people daydream, after all, there’s no better way to spend an end of the day science class than to stare out a classroom window at the peak of springtime, bringing to memory the dinner you had last Tuesday. But I’ve started to notice recently that my daydreaming habit makes me look absolutely insane. Not spacey, or like I have my “head stuck in the clouds,” but much rather like I am living in an alternate reality at most moments in the day. I’m not thinking about yesterday’s dinner or Tuesday’s math test, but instead, I often find myself reimagining and recreating previous conversations and situations, preparing dialogue for myself and others that fit the situation.
The worst part of it all is that, in real life and real time, I physically react to these hypothetical situations. Yes, you can often find me smiling or gasping or vexing my eyebrows at a situation that never happened. People will often ask me, “Are you okay?” or “What’s so funny?” when they catch me in the act, to which I have to respond, “Oh yeah, oh yeah, it was just something that happened earlier today.” Little do they know such a thing literally never happened, and the imagined situation actually included them yelling at me for my wrongdoings whereby I perform a beautiful soliloquy that leaves the crowd in my mind cooing and awwing, tears streaming both their face and mine.
I assumed this was a normal brain function, that everybody lived their life distracted by the merely hypothetical, but I soon found out most people live their lives vicariously through other people’s social media pages, and not through a fictitious version of their own lives that runs through their mind at every given moment of the day. I mean, if we get severely technical about it, some might consider social media pages to be fictitious because they project only select information in a filter of glorification, but at least other people can see, feel, and understand an internet page. My very funny conversation with the old lady at the fictional supermarket, however, can not be seen, or heard, or understood by anybody but myself. My little world is oddly personal and often locks me within the confines of my own mind. It can be weird, for me and for other people, but it can also act as a creative catalyst, allowing my mind to constantly rail ideas, flying through situations and emotions and dialogue.
As a blog writer or an assignment writer, my habit gets in the way, because I so often find myself imagining that I wrote the paper in an hour before class and handed it in, getting a perfect grade and smiling at my successes, when in reality it’s 8 hours before the assignment is due and I'm without both ideas and energy. I can only hope that my journey (my real life one) takes me into dramatic or fictional writing, because if I can find a demographic of those who really enjoy stories about the trials and tribulations of a melodramatic ice cream shop, my writing will make Broadway stages and New York Times Best Seller lists.
