I’ve been thinking about this post for a couple of days. I’m not quite sure why I want to write it; it is, after all, about those things that we keep hidden and safe from prying eyes as they could make us vulnerable to others. My closest guess is that some part of me wanted to explore the ideas that we privately come up with. That doesn’t mean to say I’m going to undress all of my fantasies and parade them in front of you.
Nevertheless, as a writer, I get to play out some of them through the use of my characters and I’m not always totally sure where they come from. I suppose a few, such as being rescued, are things I absorbed from movies when I was much younger. My favourite movies, for example, were Disney’s Robin Hood and Sleeping Beauty. Both have themes of rescue in them, yet Sleeping Beauty interested me more as she has to be awoken by a kiss. Maybe it’s the romantic in me, but I have always liked the idea of being woken by a kiss.
It strikes me that somebody willing to kiss you awake must be desperate for you to be with them in body and in mind, which always seemed quite sweet to me. Saying that, however, I wouldn’t want to be kept awake all night by somebody so obsessive that they wouldn’t let me sleep.
That’s why they are usually fantasies, though. If they were real, people would take them too far and we would feel out of control or out of our depth. The whole advantage to a fantasy is that they are just that: fantasy. We get to control the outcomes and be braver and more daring than we ever would be in real life. We muse on things that will never be.
As writers, our fantasies are what drive our writing. We go off into the same crazy worlds that thrill us in other ways and we create something that mixes our own desires with the possibility of things that we can create, such as magical landscapes and dashing heroes. It is always interesting to hear about the fantasies of others, I find, and where their daydreams take them. They can tell you an awful lot about people that you wouldn’t expect just by analysing their flights of fancy.
Another thing that interests me is where such fantasies come from. I can put some of mine down to things I watched as a child, but a lot spout from experiences I’ve had and the way in which I think and feel.
Fantasies are like a photograph of our vulnerabilities.
I think they teach us an awful lot more about the people around us than what they say or do in society. It sometimes annoys me that so many people are more interested in the material things when clearly it’s what’s going on in your head that matters more. An example would be my parents. Whenever I meet anyone new, my parents always ask what their parents do for a living and whether or not my new friend has a job. You could put that down to common curiosity, I suppose, but it seems to me that society has become far more concerned with your financial status than your holistic status. And by holistic status I mean the way in which we think and feel as well as what else we may do or be.
Personally, I reckon people should focus that little bit more on their fantasies.
Perhaps it is because it’s Halloween tomorrow that this has been preying on my mind. Nevertheless, whatever the reason may be, it has caused me to ponder over it more than usual and you may have guessed that I quite like analysing things by now. It does seem, though, that without our fantasies we would have nothing to strive towards and no goals to achieve, where possible. It also causes me to wonder why we started having fantasies in the first place.
Did we always have fantasies? Were they a bi-product of humanity becoming more aware of itself?
Are they dreams to spur us on in an otherwise grey existence?
I doubt I’ll get any answers to these questions, but I think they are good questions to ask. I reckon that they might be a mixture of all three.
I think we probably did have fantasies before we became more self aware, but they were probably far more mundane than they are now. They were probably the same fantasies your dog has when it’s running in its sleep after a big juicy rabbit. Somewhere along the line, though, our hunter gatherer instincts got a little bit twisted up with our evolution and our fantasies turned a little more fantastical. I mean, at one point in history, the clock on your mantelpiece was somebody’s fantasy.
Does that mean that our fantasies about magic and space travel might one day become a reality too? Could it be that we are creating things because we are imagining them or that our fantasies are precursors to a possible future?
I admit, that latter is a bit farfetched, but it’s worth thinking about. But, then…
Maybe I think too much.
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