Oxthink

Being a bit of a dreamer isn’t a problem if it makes us happy. What’s wrong with imagining ourselves in a better place?

Dreams offer a wondrous, mesmerising, idyllic world; a place of endless possibilities, a place where anything can happen. What’s not to like! Why wouldn’t we want to visit this place? Why wouldn’t we want to spend more time there?

When we have access to a world as good as that, it’s a wonder any of us can get out of bed!

Unfortunately, life doesn’t always allow us to live the life we want to lead. Reality tends to overpower and take precedence over our fictitious imaginings, and, too often, we get called away from our dreamy wanderings.

As a dreamer, I am not referring to those often confusing and chaotic images that occur when we’re in a deep sleep, but to those times when we just go off into our own private world, those times when we can be anything we want to be – famous, heroic, rich – there are no boundaries to our dream world existences.

Dreaming may be a form of escapism, but it is not so dissimilar to losing ourselves in a book, a computer game, or a television programme. It takes us to another world. The only difference is that this is a world of our making and choosing rather than somebody else’s. We can set the limits; we can set the rules; we can decide what will happen.

Other than for the fact that we’re not actually doing anything whilst we’re in our dream-like state, dreaming is quite similar to our other recreational activities. It’s a form of rest, relaxation, and recovery. It’s not so different from taking a holiday.

And yet being a dreamer tends to be considered a criticism, as if it’s misspent time.

In this modern world of action and progress, where there is an emphasis on making things happen, dreaming isn’t often considered a worthwhile, beneficial, or contributory pursuit. Dreaming is for idlers, people with no drive, people who have nothing better to do, people who live in a world of make-believe.

Dreaming is a distraction from reality. It stops us from doing things. And it’s true; we will never get to a better place without making some sort of effort. If we want something to happen, then it is always best to do something about it rather than just think about it.

But having a dream does, at least, give us something to aim for. Without a dream, we don’t know where we want to go; we don’t know what direction we should travel. Dreams give us hope and ambition.

In the future, the line between fiction and reality will become increasingly blurred. Even now, we can sometimes emerge from a life-like dream and wonder whether or not it really happened. A dream can be so vivid that it feels real; we can wonder whether it actually happened. Dazed and confused, we can emerge from a dream wondering which world we actually belong to.

One day, as sci-fi conjectures, it may be possible to make that dream world our primary world, our first-choice world. If it’s that good a place, then why wouldn’t we? That fourth dimension may become our alternative reality, our preferred reality.

And the beauty of it is that dreaming offers a world we can keep returning to. We can relive the same thing or move on to new events. If we don’t like something, then we can go somewhere else; if we don’t like someone, then we can exclude them from our world. The choice is always ours.

Dreaming may be a rather indulgent, rather egocentric, rather fruitless activity. But it does no particular harm, neither to us nor to others. We should never be ashamed or deterred from returning to our dreams. There is nothing wrong with being a bit of a dreamer.