Daydreams are structued as stories.
Imagining oneself as having another life, different from the one you have lived, is one version of a daydream, and there are other kinds of daydreams that will be referred to later. What happens in that particular daydream, let us say in Boise, Idaho or Lincoln, Nebraska, is that a person imagines how he or she took one or more forks in the road and so came to live in a different place or time, a satisfying conjecture given the pleasures of time travel romances and disasters, people finding love in another age, or fining the world on the other side of apocalypse, both of them the case in the granddaddy of the literary version of the genre, E. G. Wells’ “The Time Machine”. The thing about daydreams is that they are not random thoughts but are stories, filled with incidents and described situations and even dialogue, and so are subject to the restraints of stories and so not to be dismissed as mere reveries.
I can well imagine that I made a major decision in my late twenties to trade in my Ivy League doctorate for a non-prestigious university in rural America, maybe Boise, Idaho or Lincoln, Nebraska, rather than staying in a minor university in the New York area. Think of the changes. I could have taught different courses and studied different subjects. I might have engaged in faculty governance more than I in fact did. I don’t like driving and so I would live walking distance to campus except when I took out the car for when it snowed. I would take occasional trips to Seattle or Chicago to fortify myself with fine food and culture and congested buildings. I might daly with politics in that every fifth person in Manhattan is running for office while in rural cities I could easily become involved in local Democratic ;politics, though knowing it was a hopeless cause. I might take up some conservative preachers as friends so as to have people to argue with, though I don’t think I would convert about politics. I think I might even join a synagogue so as to express ethnic solidarity, but I think not, given my ardent atheism. I would correspond and visit my friends in big cities, which is in fact what I do now, having relocated to Salt Lake City with my family.
There are restraints on the story I can imagine. It can’t be to become a trapeze artist or conquering Mt. Everest or becoming a pig farmer. I could not be very different from the person I am and, indeed, such a fantasy tests just how flexible a character can be, how to remain the same person I am during whatever daydream, which is very different from a novel where one can engage with people like Grendel or Madame Bovary without liking them very much. So daydreams are different from novels. I could imagine becoming a tv executive and inventing a new programming format as happened when Sylvester Weaver invented “Today” for NBC. So fantasies are self-serving rather than yielding themselves to the characters set by novelists.I can't do anything I want to be.. Becoming Batman or Superman has no attraction and I don’t know how anyone does because they are so foreign from anyone, because those characters are only atavars of one or another power even if movie makers give the Joker some literary traction.. Maybe I am not into power, but I think not. Being a Democratic committeeman is a kind of power, just one akin to the stable character that transcends my situation, whether real or fantasized.
Daydreams are optimistic in that they do not contemplate down sides. I will not get cancer if I move to Boise. And if I had a fatal car crash after my resettlement, that would be a literary irony in that in real life I did have some car accidents. It would be an appointment in Samarra, as John O”Hara put it: fate reaching out to you wherever you ran. Also, I wouldn’t bring along my bad characteristics. I wouldn‘t pick fights with my colleagues as I did in real life. My slate would beclean. I would have a new life because of a newly settled one, just like the hero in Bernard Malamud’s “A New Life”, who starts anew after having overcome being a drunk and finds himself a middlingly successful life as an academic in an inferior college without a gift for writing and a wife taken from a colleague but a satisfying life nonetheless. No life has to be perfect, just adequate.
I may be timid in my daydreams, not extending them much farther than my actual life. I have not taken a survey of other people’s daydreams, and they may be more aggressive or expansive or fantastic, but people queried may be reticent about revealing their daydreams, just as they are reticent about their nightdreams. However, my personal views are supported by how people actually behave when they live out their fantasies when they engage in activities such as vacations and retirement, which are people when they can indulge themselves to do what they want at least temporarily what they want to wish. People do not become racing drivers when on vacation; they may go watch people who engage in race car contests. They go to resorts to eat and sleep and sun and play tennis. People who retire move to Florida or Arizona to do the same things. Similarly, people who daydream do not imagine themselves to be coal miners rather than just higher up in middle management. Only young people, except those particularly driven or gifted, plan to be U. S. Senators. People daydream about the possible.
Here is another limitation set up on my daydreams of alternative lives. A daydreamer has to take account of the things in your current life that you don’t want to leave. Even after a divorce, people will say they are glad about the life they lived because it gave you the children which you find precious. So a way of having another life is to get rid of the story concerning precious people who would be altered by that. I could not move to Boi9se because my wife, who I loved dearly, said we could live anywhere I wanted so long as it was between the East River and the Hudson River. I would have to alter the story by having her die, a ready device for scriptwriters, but which would be too upsetting for me to contemplate, or just writeher out of the script, my relocation occurring before we ever met. That would make it a very different life and so I might write the story with her going to Boise. Again, the question is just how much to alter my character rather than just my situation, and so a daydream, how that alternative story is constructed, telling how flexible or fixed is my character. Can I imagine Boise without her?
Here are other forms of day dreams which are conditioned by the age of the dreamer. An old person can come up with the same material that they imagine in an alternative life but for a very different purpose. I no longer think of moving to Boise as a possible alternative life, a decision, but just a case of trying to relive a life. I would be young and starting out in my career and starting a family and making friends and coming into my middle age, whether particularly successful, in my career or not, but still a longer road than I presently have. It would be nice to be young, or an adult, doing things which other people thought were important, myself full of health and brimming with vigor. I would cherish faculty tussles and new ideas and maybe a new spouse to come to appreciate even if I would have brought my old wife with me to Boise so we could both be young again. Spouses when they are old have arthritis and health emergencies more often than when young. Better to be old rather than dead, but better to be young. I would also like setting up Christmas trees again, even if I again did so badly, as I did the first time. Reservice your young events.
Being young is another condition of daydreaming. You can be more or less ambitious about your career and you can imagine finding a woman far out of your league. The thing about youthful daydreams is that they are not constrained by choosing one of the other of the twin emotions of envy and jealousy that Georg Simmel carefully distinguished. Envy, Simmel said, is wanting something you can't accomplish, so you are envious of a man handsome enough to become a spouse of a great beauty or b eing envious of a mathematician because your own brain does not have the muscle power to manage that. Jealousy, on the other hand, is desiring an object or a situation that it is possible for you to attain but where circumstances intervene. I can only be envious of becoming a center fielder for the N. Y. Yankees, but Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront'' is envious when he says that “I could have been a contender”, however sad he feels that the opportunity is long past him But in daydreams there is no such limitation. You can dream of things quite implausible and beyond your capacity. You can become accomplished without either envy or jealousy. You can be a movie star or a President however much in reality either job may be more anxiety creating than satisfactory. Ambition, as Macbeth appreciated, is what dreams are made of.
By and large, daydreams are constructive, optimistic and comforting. To daydream otherwise is to be suspect, deeply unsettled. A person who daydreams killing a spouse or oneself needs therapeutic intervention. A person who thinks the worst will happen is thought anxious and depressed rather than merely a pessimist. On the other hand, night dreams are filled with dread, fear and going out of control. What explains the difference? Freud thought that dreams responded to the deepest and suppressed feelings and thought they centered around sex, because it was such a prime impulse, even if there are so many other baleful prospects for people to dream about, such as death or spurned lovers or business reverses.
A clear distinction between daydreams and night dreams aside from their effects is that day dreams deal with the arrangement of social life, where to live and work and what kinds of friends and lovers with whom to associate, while dreams have to do with the existential and therefore the most primitive impulses that can be discovered in the psyche, those having to do with lust and death (not food or culture). Daydreams are about ambition and self enhancement and the transformations within a self, while dreams are about basic needs and dangers and the transformation into becoming a different self, as in Ovid’s “Metamorphosis”. Obviously, daydreams can include transgressive sexual activities, but they can be arranged to work out while Freud’s view of incestuous sexual activities leaves doom in the form of lifelong psychic scars alleviated only by the magic of therapy. Pick which one, day dreams or night dreams, not to cultivate, because they are both natural occurrences, but which one is more worthy of attention.