The art of daydreaming
I’ve forgotten how to daydream.
I realised this when faced with two hours of ‘spa experience’ at the Ironmongers Baths near Old Street last week. I had been meaning to go and considering the spring warmth from last week had faded and there was hail forecast, I booked in at my soonest convenience. Two hours, in other words: the length of a ‘serious’ film, the amount of time it takes to prep and roast a chicken, the actual amount of time I could spend on TikTok at a time, how long it takes to drive from my parents’ house to Gordano services on the M5.
I arrived already thinking about leaving. I was having dinner with some old friends and was calculating how long it would take to get from Old Street to Victoria, factoring in 15 minutes to shower, get changed and ready. The Hammam scrub I’d booked was scheduled for right at the end of my two hours and I was suddenly anxious about how much time I had to kill between now and then, and asked the receptionist if I could make it half an hour earlier. 90 minutes felt more palatable. As I was changing I was growing increasingly concerned about how I would Spend My Time. No phone (lack of signal and the fact I was going in and out of 50º temperatures, and the fact that this was supposed to be relaxing) but also no book or notebook as I hadn’t packed either. Just me and my thoughts, I guess, a somewhat terrifying concept and the reason why I can’t seem to meditate.
I used to be a daydreamer.
I suppose I still am but only when the sun is hot and there’s nothing else to do but lie in the grass and eat a perfect sandwich: a powdery white country roll split open by hand, both sides smeared with salted butter sliced as thick as cheese; paper thin slices of ham and tart little cornichons for balance. At home I like to lie unclothed with the sun spiking my skin and it is only then that I allow thoughts of productivity or to-do lists or loneliness or guilt to disappear from my mind. The key to daydreaming - much like meditating - is not to get to stuck on what to daydream about. Just let the scene play out like a film flickering on the inside of your eyelids.
But we don’t always allow ourselves the space to daydream. I use this word specifically, because I think capitalism wants us to dream and dream big, mostly because these often consist of moneyed ambition. But daydreaming is a much more subtle and quieter art. Whereas dreaming is unlocked by sleep (a necessity), daydreaming is unlocked by doing nothing (a choice). And unfortunately, to do nothing typically implies laziness, mainly because it doesn’t square up with productivity (a tool for capitalism). As I explained to my parents last night, I’m not anti-capitalist (not in practice, anyway); but I am against over-optimisation. If there’s one thing we shouldn’t need to optimise for the sake of a dollar, it’s our propensity to drift and daydream.
Jenny Odell wrote about this in her 2019 book, The Art Of Doing Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy. In it, she explores time as a capitalist concept, arguing that to find and make space for positively enforcing ‘doing nothing’ is to see life for what it is: a flowing, never-ending experience. One that cannot be quantified but can be intensely felt.
Capitalism depends on our ability to believe that time is a commodity, something that can be traded or exchanged, and that the value of our lives is directly tied to how much we can extract from the time we have. Under capitalism, we are taught to think of time as a finite resource that must be 'spent' wisely. Yet this way of thinking undermines our ability to imagine and experience time outside of the clock's ticking rhythm.
I guess in some ways to daydream is to let go of control. Because daydreams exist outside the boundaries of ‘reality’, instead allowing you to escape into an imagined world where anything can happen. To dream is to unconsciously give into your interior world; to daydream is to consciously explore. To allow ourselves to feel a little bored and overcome the boredom with the wild reaches of our imagination.
Towards the end of my spa experience I’m curled up in a ball getting warm after cold plunging for a minute or so in 5º waters. I found myself entranced by a man sat in the corner writing something down. His back was tattooed with a thin-lined circled that went from the shoulder to shoulder and down to the bottom of his spine. I could see fragments of it as he leant forward and back, his legs crossing then uncrossing as he wrote faintly and lightly in his notebook. How odd to have a first encounter with someone in such silence, so stripped back, strangely intimate. I began to daydream and allowed the room to hold me and my drifting, meandering imaginings. Suddenly the time that felt so stretched out and elongated to me earlier was quickly running out. It felt silly to imagine a few glances exchanged in the heat of this room could amount to anything more than a passing of time. But still the mind wonders and wanders.
There’s a difference between coincidence and kismet. I’ve taken to believing in the latter because it’s easier than facing up to the former – that life is simply a series of random, seemingly insignificant events. A coping mechanism of sorts, one that places you in the centre instead of over in the periphery. This belief does require a certain amount of letting things go – something I’m still learning about. I like control. I like to know where things might lead. The daydreams drift but after a while I want to find a way to turn them true. I guess what I need to remember is that the art of daydreaming is also the art of leaving things well alone. It has little to do with destiny or fate. The daydreams don’t play in that arena. They’re just a playground where the carousel never stops spinning.
