Making magic
Dedicated to daydreams and the importance of being full of thoughts
The first time it happened, it was a shock. But every unconscious thought becoming aware of itself is.
There she is, 9-year-old me, badly cut fringe and all (whatever all means), standing on a stage in front of an overwhelming crowd of strangers and schoolmates, while some lady read aloud a short story I had written and submitted to a local magazine by suggestion (intimidation is a better word) of my Italian teacher. It wasn’t a good fit for the magazine, but would my teacher be interested in this writing competition called Piccoli Scrittori (Italian for Little Writers)? She was, and a few months later, to my surprise, I was announced as the winner.
Winning the competition meant attending a reading of my own story, at the end of which I was handed a rolled-up certificate, secured in place with cheap satin ribbon, too shiny for my already rainy spirit, and a local artist’s take on my story, drawn on flimsy, evanescent paper that my mother promptly framed and hung in my childhood bedroom. It was still there the last time I visited, a quiet reminder of love, the kind of love that asks for nothing in return, that loves itself so easily.
The award ceremony, however brief and unpompous, was everything I dreaded the most, all of it at once: standing on that stage, waiting for the reading of my story to be over, I could sense the attention of the room on my awkward body, which was the body of a child and of a woman at the same time, its tensions so vast and archaic, so innately familiar with the spectrum of perceiving, with being perceived and ill-perceived, yet so terrified of it.
It was while I was thinking about all the possible ways in which my image looked wrong under the cold artificial lights that the thing that came as a shock, the waking dream pulled at my chest for the first time and threw me into a new dimension, somewhere else, somewhere where I could feel like myself. I could tell you stories about what this other dimension looked like, but I’d lie, the way language sometimes is a lie. This thing I’m earning my living with. Words. Semantic containers for worlds too large to be contained.
I don’t remember where my mind led me on that occasion, probably somewhere close to my grandparents’ farm, its ploughed fields always brimming with possibility, but I know that since then, I’ve been led out of the uncomfortable realities of my body and into alternate scenarios that often feel just as real many times. It’s a coping mechanism I have little control over, but sometimes I invite it consciously: languid stares into space have become my specialty. I’d be waiting for my picture to be taken and find myself behind the lens instead, looking at what I’m only inhabiting, without holding judgement, only a curiosity, or I’d be waiting for my train, watch it peacefully advancing on the tracks and imagine what it would take for it to turn into a worm on a straw, or I’d be reading and this one word, its perfect placement at the perfect moment, would conjure a lost memory and invite new fallacious details to make it rounder, more exciting to remember.
Some call it zoning out, others call it dissociating (although it feels less like detachment than a desire for a deeper connection with life). I guess you could call it daydreaming, but I call it magic, this infinite space that exists inside a skull, all the hallowed forms it takes.
Like Blanche says in Tennessee Williams’ A streetcar Named Desire, “I don’t want realism, I want magic.”
I’ve become so good at making magic that when I ask friends or family to repeat what they just said to me, the reply is almost always: “Did you zone out again?” I usually like to answer that being zoned out is my natural state, that I just zone back in once in a while.
Although I mean it as a joke, there is some truth in my line, one that hints at the possibility that inviting diverse thoughts in my mind instead of rejecting them in the name of focus can be a good thing.
In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, adapted from a short story by James Thurber, Ben Stiller plays a clumsy 40-something who spends day after monotonous day developing photos for Life magazine. To escape the dull, he often zones out into an imaginary world rich with adventures and dreams fulfilled. Only when he faces unemployment, he decides to stand up for himself and become an agent in his life.
The movie is an elegant celebration the overwhelming beauty of the present moment, the pronounced joy and healing nature of being fully alert. But what if we have become too alert? Is there such a thing as too much focus?
According to psychologist Rebecca L. McMillan who co-authored a paper titled “Ode To Positive Constructive Daydreaming,” mind-wandering can aid in the process of “creative incubation.” Many of us know from experience that our best ideas come seemingly out of the blue when our minds are relaxed and elsewhere. Being too alert or focused on a task may kill the opportunity for a creative revelation.
The practice of daydreaming may seem mindless but there’s evidence that it could involve a highly engaged brain state. Spacing out once in a while can lead to sudden connections and insights because it’s related to our ability to recall information in the face of distractions. Nevertheless, we have elected focus, presence, and attention to the mundane as the gatekeepers of happiness and success. Thanks to on-demand technology, there’s no second left to wonder, no moment left unexamined, no opportunity left for spacing out the zone. Yet, this system of ubiquitous comfort seems to fail us: while everything is more accessible and people more connected than ever, we’re witnessing a global epidemic of stress and anxiety.
I wonder if it’s not our monkey mind but our fearful aversion to it that makes us miserable.
I hear a lot about mindfulness, which is the state of being aware of sensation, but I don’t hear much about thoughtfulness, which is the state of being full of thoughts, another way of saying full of life. Because thinking, whether we’re aware of it or not, is the thing that keeps us alive.
Thinking is a process, our mind the witness of life living itself. Like every process, it gets messy before it gets somewhere. But that doesn’t make it less rewarding. Being absorbed in thoughts and daydreams, dissociated from the duties of the day, is how I started writing this piece. And staying zoned out is how I arrived at its last sentence.
These moments where I’m zoned out, jumping from one train of thought to another are, ironically, the moments when I’m the most zoned-in, the most connected and alive. These are also the moments when the world feels more manageable. Not because it becomes safer or more distant but because there’s more nothingness, more in-betweens, more possibilities, more naturally occurring blank spaces that reveal the whole of the picture into its fullness.
A picture so intimately composed that it almost feels like magic.