Do you know someone with a tendency to stare off into space with glazed, unfocused eyes and a faraway smile at nothing in particular? Perhaps they have a habit of asking ‘…wait, what?’ as you both realise they’ve been on another planet entirely. Congratulations! You’ve just identified a daydreamer in their natural habitat. Now, gently steer them away from the lamppost they’re obliviously about to walk into.

Daydreamers are a strange breed. They seem to ponder rather than think, savour rather than simply enjoy. And, whether they’ll admit it or not, they share a belief that the inside of their mind is more interesting than the world around them. This belief is one that can, and often will, startle and disturb upon first realisation.

Take mine, for example. Picture this: there I was, very young, easily distracted, and in a class with a teacher whose face I can’t remember and a lesson plan I never really did end up committing to memory. All in all, a perfect recipe for disaster. This particular disaster came, as some tend to do, once my lunch break ended, when I was forced to put my book away and face the real world. And then, as if by fate, it hit me: although figures of authority could take away my external forms of entertainment, they couldn’t take away my overactive imagination, my propensity towards wilful disobedience, or my ability to daydream. In many ways, this revelation was the beginning of the end for me.

The impact of this moment cannot be overstated: my life was now irrevocably changed into the years BD (Before Daydreaming) and AD (After Daydreaming). I remember the years BD with a kind of sepia-toned quality to them: these were the dark years where I lived a hermit-like existence devoid of animation or amusement. (The fact that I was probably busy learning to speak or developing my fine motor skills often escapes my notice in these recollections). Then, the revelation – let’s call it the Moment of Magic – appears, and my life transforms from sepia to Technicolour. Your very own Dorothy, finally in Oz!*

Unlike Dorothy, who at least learns that her pretty red heels will send her home whenever she likes, the skill of daydreaming is not an immediately useful one. It’s quite unfortunate that it’s not the sort of thing you can put on your CV, although ‘Tanita Jose, Professional Daydreamer’ has a nice ring to it. But, then again, so does ‘Tanita Jose, Professional Nutcase’, I suppose. Nor is it a particularly good party trick. For some reason, looking off into the distance and zoning out of small talk just doesn’t seem to impress people. At least, not at the parties I’ve been to.**

And then, of course, there’s the problem of time. Daydreaming time, I’ve found, tends to translate into quite a bit of real-world time. Every vacation, for instance, I plan to treat myself to a few hours of daydreaming here and there as a reward for getting through the term. A few weeks and countless frantic texts from my friends later, I find myself on the other side of the holidays, confused about how the time disappeared so quickly. There are still summers marked not by what I did or who I saw, but by the playlists I listened to, my emotional melodramas over people I never really ended up knowing, and, of course, the increasingly strange plots of my daydreams. These are summers that most people (on especially pragmatic days, myself included) would call The Forgotten Days, wasted in their unfolding and now forever lost to time. On many levels, I agree with them. What became of those days? While others lived in the nitty-gritty of the real world, I examined the contours of my mind for no reason beyond simple pleasure. Yet in many other ways, I am who I am because of them.

My friends and I have a game we sometimes play where we pretend our lives are a television show. We talk about events in terms of plot value and wonder how some of the more… questionable decisions we make would be received, playing back memories like old recordings until they begin to blur. We love to talk about the audience (hello, you!) and how we’d be perceived. Yes, we might require a cure for what seems to be a fatal case of early-onset narcissism, but in this day and age, who doesn’t?

In doing so, we are stuck in an odd liminal space, both deeply situated within our lives and looking at it from the critical remove of an outside perspective. Conversations start with ‘Oh my god, do you remember when…’ and end with musings on the way the shots would switch from one friend’s chaos to another’s perfect calmness. The strangeness of this doubled perspective, refracting our memories like flimsy 3D cinema glasses, gives me a headache just thinking about it. But it is also, I think, indicative of a strong performative impulse that runs through our present time. While certainly not unique to contemporary society – I do wholeheartedly believe that Renaissance men dwelled on whether they came across as especially suave to their favourite courtiers – I would argue that modern society’s obsession with the gaze is magnified in an unprecedented way by our reliance on those damn phones.

Our preoccupation with our digital presence betrays a deep cultural fascination with the inherent power dynamics of looking. The act of daydreaming, however, allows us to participate in an environment where we are the only ones with this power. In a world with a near panopticon level of social surveillance and importance attributed to how we ‘appear’ (sometimes it feels like we’ve gone back to practising physiognomy), there’s a sweet sense of relief in looking at something that does not – cannot – look back. Daydreaming allows you to stop the endless dull performance of mock-authenticity needed to navigate the world and instead escape into a theatrical performance meant for your eyes only with newfound vigour. After all, sometimes it’s just nice to let the wires show.

Joan Didion reminds us that ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live’. We do this, of course, in the narratives we construct every day without realising. Whether it’s in a list of events that answer ‘how was your day?’ or the grand five-year plan you’ve artfully created to finally end up with your crush, narratives are what we use to make sense of a random and incomprehensible world. In constructing a narrative for the simple fact of your pleasure, however, daydreaming feels like a radical act. The sheer hedonism of a performance wherein you play both actor and audience denies the ever-watching world the immediate visibility it seeks: you, not the world around you, bear witness to your narrative. You can be a hundred different people in the space of an hour (give or take) and slip into personalities like second skins. But, above all, daydreaming is a space for play without consequence. And playing without consequence, as it turns out, is shockingly fun.

* Please excuse the egregious Wicked reference. Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo currently occupy the majority of my waking thoughts.

** If you do know of any parties where daydreaming is bound to impress, please give me a shout. I’ll RSVP the second I come back to reality.