Fantasy or daydream is a kind or structure or story that is more primitive than are the kind of stories that are associated with Aristotle as having a beginning, middle and end, those that build suspense to a climax and then offer an emotional release or completion. Aristotle had in mind the sophisticated performances in drama, which are aimed at an audience who will get pleasure and meaning from having mimicked reality in their productions, requiring its audience to see how the performance is similar and different from reality, how gestures and words are like what real people say and do, and create a mood which is different from what one has felt and contemplated than what they had experienced. The audience, whatever their walks of life, only intermittently suspend their disbelief. The nature of the story is to go in and out of it so as to continually refract on the differences between reality and illusion.
Here are some of those sub theatrical activities, these defined as simply collections of subsequent events that do not have to add up to drama, but are significant nonetheless in creating emotion and information. There is the chronicle play, which just adds to the list of entries of kings and other important people in the simple pursuit of having recorded their names on the grounds that keeping a permanent list is itself noteworthy and a tribute to the idea of history though real history begins with Herodotus and Thucydides and “Genesis” which insisted that those true and complete stories should be preserved for their insights as well as the fact that these stories were supposed to be true. The inspiring things about chronicles is that the facts cited claim to be true, that such and such a king had that as its name. The account of it is about the fact of it, a fact recorded in fact in the writing, and so not a fantasy. Other sub-dramatic stories include dialogues, whereby we see the interplay of talk, sometimes to dramatic import, as in Plato, but in an everyday way where people can come to acknowledge that the weather is chilly but not all that chilly, which is a drama because it moves from struggle to resolution. So there are two facts; the actuality of the process of dialogue and the results of dialogue, whereby a process leads to a more true result. Rituals can also have a dramatic story if the liturgist has not designed there to be a climax and peace or resolution of the holy moment, but liturgies can just be repetitive chants, as seems to happen in pre-literate cultures.Liturgical events can be treated as operative, as in the Catholic Mass, or aas indications that stand for or suggest something that is truly true, and so a version of reality. None of the pre-dramas may not require onlookers to be categorized or abstracted as an audience, which understands itself to stay still to attend the performance and remain anonymous while the players do what they do. Rather, in pre-dramas, a person can wander in and out of a ritual or change it by interrupting or transforming it or someone special having come into the ceremony. Art had not yet been disciplined into the dyad of performance and audience.
Focus down on fantasies or daydreams, which are sequences of events which properly identified by Freud as responding to an impulse of the dreamer, though he insisted that dreams were always motvted by a sexual desire and were therefore transformed so as to shelter people from their true desires. Fantasies, done awake, already have already been encoded so that people will not think about what they do not want to think. Instead, they are wish fulfillments having to do with life achievements, either in work or in leisure, that might or might never be achieved, and so understood by psychologists as escapes from reality, a pause from reality so as to find solace in a daydream, when I want to say something different, which is that daydreams can be as various as any storymaking and so emotional rich and also important because daydreams impinge on the planning out of real life.
I would classify three basic types of daydreams. I am making suggestions of what sorts of genres are to be made of daydreams, and so parallel to what critics, such as Northrope Frye do, when they catalog the varieties of literary expression, such as novels, lyric poems, epics, and so on. To at least scratch the surface, these three daydreams are associated with three different emotions because of the kind of alteration there is in the story of the wish fulfillment, and so daydreams are not limited to pleasant thoughts about how to escape from the humdrum by becoming a doctor if you had been good at school or going on a cruise if you won a lottery ticket .I would separate daydreams into low, medium and high degrees of alteration from the life that has been or is likely to be led.
First of all, there are alterations whereby a single change of event, an altered moment in your life, where life for the future would have been very, very different--or not. For instance, you might have met a girl because she went to the wrong party or decided independently to go to another school not knowing that one choice might lead you to meet her while another choice did not result in her meeting you. I would suggest that the consideration of such daydreams is frightening because it shows how many circumstances and coincidences make up your life, your life not under your control. That is why people come to think their lives are inevitable or fated even if that event is ordinary rather than magical in that a person can accomplish what he or she daydreams about, such as living in a good neighborhood or finding a suitable spouse, life accomplishing what you wanted to have happen, and so satisfied with that, even though you might have wound up with other cities o spouses that also suited you in pretty much the same manner.
Second of all, there might have been a situation that altered your life but not really, as having gone through the undergraduate years in a state school rather than an Ivy, which might not have altered very much at all because your character and other tendencies would lead you in your direction and so place you in your political point of view or your occupation regardless of such situations. A likely spouse depends not just on propinquity but having similar values and tastes and so you will go hither and yon to find your nextdoor neighbor, as when Clara Bow is found next door when her not quite beau returns from World War I in the silent “Wings'' while the hero in the silent “The Big Parade” has to go back to France to find his true love. The emotion associated with these films and these daydreams is forlorn and sad, trying to cling to what is the main line, the main direction of your life. Richard Dreyfuss is willing to go off to visit the aliens in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind'' because he has already abandoned his wife, and so doesn’t have any strings attached to this life and so can indulge the fanciful one because people are most of the time attached rather than dissociated. Many people would not abandon their families to go to the alien planet, just as a person would feel abandoned if you had in your life imagined a reverie in which your children would be different from the ones who were in fact yours. Reveries suspend what would be a loss in reality. Reveries abandon friends, colleagues, the memories of the career in fact than the ones not filled out from a possibility. Spouses go to war out of obligation more than for adventure
Third, there are lives that are imagined that are not all that different from what in fact were the events that did eventuate but freed of obligations and satisfactions with what really eventuated, as when one goes through a career in Nebraska rather than in New York or the New England environs. This is different enough to find a different spouse and career and is exotic by comparison, though what is important about it is that there is a prospect of a different adventure, and so is a reverie of old people who would prefer to be young, just starting out, rather than set in their ways and with histories, it not really important that you wrote different books or went into politics .It's the fact of the environment that makes the life different, looking at mountains rather than shores and placed in a contrary rather than a supportive political environment, and to discover whether that would make a difference. So in such reveries you might have been motivated to engage rather than ponder politics or maybe not to be concerned about it at all. That reverie, the one of the alternative life, is more satisfying because there is so much freedom in imagining what it might contain and that might be why such reveries are most likely or maybe just recited as reveries because they have such pleasant outcomes.
There are other things to be said about daydreams than that they are story-like structures which can therefore be classified into their generic types so that kinds of stories lead to distinctive emotions and meanings. Another fact of daydreams is that they are functional activities in that they allow people to organize or analyze the usual procedures that are part of life, a difficult thing to manage even if it is even more difficult to analyze structures such as family or community or formal organization because none of them are to be identified with a particular feeling even though analysts like to think that community is solidarity rather than just constant interaction or that nations have to do with loyalty when what they have to do with is interdependence and shared usages such as language and a common curriculum that includes The Declaration of Independence.
Think of the James Webb telescope where the engineers said that deployment required some sixty or so steps (which means sixty or so procedures) for the telescope to deploy after it had been lofted up into the sky by a space vehicle. That meant that the engineers had planned the sixty odd events that had to be sequenced correctly and that any one of them could go wrong however much the engineers thought they had worked out the bugs beforehand. You had to do first, second, third and up to the last step. You avoided unnecessary steps and simplified the ones that could not be avoided.That, in fact, is the same kind of process that goes on in daydreaming. You imagine or measure the various steps that you put on a process that will happen naturally or through planning so as to see how far one has gotten along. You know you have completed one lap of an oval and are planning to run, let us say, eight laps. You got through three innings of nine and so wonder when to start thinking of bringing in a reliever. Not all of such daydreams have to do with competitions or races or compared numerically, as when I say that my walking goal is three hydrants away. Think of a routine process of bathing or shaving as when you say the worst of it is over when you get out of the tub without having fallen or you still have to deal with shaving your lip or, in more complicated relationships, you can breath more easily when the person hiring you says he will bring you to your superior for final approval. Something might still go wrong, but this is a lesser hurdle.
The way we organize the steps is through daydreaming, through imagining what the various steps will be and being thrown for a loop if there are steps that arose that were unanticipated, like taking a spelling test before getting a job as a typist. You handle that unprepared. Daydreams are therefore functional rather than just an escape from ordinary or extraordinary events, a cessation of planning but rather the heart of planning. So it was when William Golding, the novelist, imagined that cave people imagined how they might get across a river and thought of alternative scenarios to do that, maybe by walking through a ford or sitting on a floating log, discarding the idea that waiting for the river to dry out was not a very practical stratagem. Out of daydreams come plans, all the way up to the Webb telescope.
Here are some other versions of practical daydreams that are associated with a kind of measurement. Rather than “the worst is over”, people say of themselves that they “are in the last lap”, which means close to finishing, the advantage that you can use the rest of your energy or that it will happen in a thrice and so you are very close and not much to overcome. Those are daydreams because you think about how much has been overcome and are on the verge of ending, a thought that companies you while you are still part of the event but having parceled out in your rumination of the entire project so as to encourage you so that thoughts can overcome adversity. I have only three credits to a degree or one more form before getting a loan. I had a friend who the morning after her dissertation defense said that she never again had to take another dissertation defense and so she turned over and went back to sleep. More intermediate rather than ultimate and penultimate reveries include birthdays to measure what has gone before or what will come later. Everything dividing time becomes comparative so as to make it observable as an objective situation, and so a sort of progress, if only coming closer to death or farther away from some traumatic event, as when you met your spouse or got your first job. So daydreams about careers and lives are subsets of looking from the outside when engaged in your daydreams rather than suspending your lives for some alternative courses. Nothing frivolous about it.
Beyond being generic types of stories and functional ways of planning through measurements imposed by daydreams, daydreams find their way into intellectual history because they provide an explanation of the idea of capitalist fetishism, which Marx said had to be explained as the irrational desire to accumulate wealth for itself alone, far beyond what might be needed to satisfy any economic pleasure or object. A good example of capitalist fetishism is Scrooge McDuck jumping into his swimming pool filled with coins. Never mind that you couldn’t swim in it and that it would be hard when you hit the surface, the image does provide the sense of being covered with wealth and luxuriating in that. Nowadays, wealth, however, is not made of coins but rather of numbers recorded in bank accounts and investment companies, and so what people contemplate is the extent to which the numbers go up and go down, today’s value available on your computer to be updated whenever you please, depending how anxious or how pleased you are to observe the latest change. So capitalist fetishism is a measurement whereby you can daydream about your personal story of your wealth, its ups and downs and what you might suppose to do when your bank book or portfolio reaches a certain level. Will you buy a house or a fancy automobile or take a cruise or just now say of yourself that you are now a rich person rather than just a comfortable man or even just someone who is on a path to a comfortable retirement? Daydreaming is enhanced by the various forms in which to use markers of measurement of wealth and so I would suggest that capitalist fetishism becomes important as something available to many people when good banking accounts took place in the late middle ages even though, obviously enough, there were people before it who were as rich as Croesus.
The relation between reality and daydreams is that daydreamers stipulate or assume the parameters of reality that condition and allow the daydream. You daydream with or without a spouse or family or with or without the abilities to become a violinist or an outfielder. You are satisfied whether with or without and that tells you what you are in reality, what you want to eliminate or not. Similarly, people establish measurements so as to overcome or accomplish an ordeal, such as a foot race or an academic degree. The most important aspect of reality, however, is that an action takes place which makes it a parameter of reality rather than a daydream or a parameter within a daydream. How you vote and what you say to girlfriends make a difference. People may have planned to return to the land near the Nile when the river was no longer flooded, but that was a hope or a daydream rather than an actuality until people could record what the limits of a lot were and were written down rather than the subject of just haggling or the justice of the most powerful, as when sharecroppers could not examine the records of the company store about how much was owed. Facts constrict daydreams even as they enable persons to wish upon a star that they will become rich.