Friday 9th September

I have always daydreamed.  In fact, although I must dream at night, these aren’t what I remember.  They are like a different existence altogether – not really me, or not me in control anyway, half the time I am running away or in situations I don’t recognise, have never been in and certainly have no desire to be in.  And when they sing about dreams, ‘follow your dreams’ or ‘seek out the girl of your dreams’, I am sure they mean daydreams not nightdreams.

I can remember being told off at school for daydreaming.  I could hear the teacher’s voice droning on, and I was sort of listening to it, but at the same time I was a million miles away.  And even now I find myself daydreaming, sometimes in company, when someone is talking to me even, I am only half-listening.  I am thinking of something else entirely.  Even as I heard the swish of the cane I was daydreaning of running around in the fields.   At work I used to think that they (the bosses) had my body for eight hours a day, but they never came close to having my mind.  I was, and still am, quite capable of performing routine tasks such as data input and daydreaming at the very same time.  In fact, it is only daydreaming that has kept me sane.  And believe me, the orison, the edge where you fall over into madness has always been far too close.

And I think that that is why I am a writer, or rather why I write at all.  It is my comfort zone, familiar territory, the world of the imagination is far more real to me than the world I find myself living in.  One of my favourite songs is “If you could read my mind” by Gordon Lightfoot.  That is exactly how I feel a lot of the time.

Of course daydreams are much like night dreams in that they dissolve like the morning mist in a few seconds.  But they, at least, are of my own creation.  I feel that my daydreams are my own, my own secret world I live in, whole vistas of possibility exist, I can be anything I want, unrestricted by age or body or previous failures.  So, parents and teachers, if you see a child obviously away in their own world, don’t tell them off, don’t stop them.  The world of the imagination is an essential part of us, for without imagination we would have to be forced to accept the world as it is dumped on us.  Without daydreaming nothing would ever change.