Dreaming

Of all the things I have tried in the last several years to fight back against my depression, making myself lie down and have a structured “day-dreaming” session at least once a day has by far been the most beneficial. I noticed this when I was at lunch with a friend just a week after I started trying this out. I was happy. Not just regular happy, either. Bubbly. The kind of happy I haven’t been for more than a year. I was optimistic about the future, had nothing bad to say about myself, and was making plans for things pretty far in the distance. I was surprised and I think my friend was, too.

So, yeah, it worked for a couple of weeks. Who knows if it will continue to work? I also don’t know why this has worked so well. Is it because I lie down and close my eyes in the middle of my regular work day, telling myself that this time belongs to me, that I own myself, that my body and my mind are my own. Is it because I feel in control? Is it just a timing coincidence? Is it actually because it’s summer time and I always love the summer because I get more exercise and more time outside and the pace of my work world slows down naturally during this time? Is it because I’ve been racing again, however badly?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but I will continue to try this method of improving my life. Let me tell you some of the dreams I’ve had. One that is recurring is me on the red carpet during a movie premiere for one of my books. Sometimes it is for the Linda Wallheim books. Sometimes it is for a book that I’m working on currently. Other times it is for a book that I haven’t even conceived of yet. The idea that I will continue to write books beyond what I can think of now is, well, delicious. Intoxicating. Addictive, even.

I’ve also had daydreams about future grandchildren (sorry, kids—no pressure, right?). I’ve imagined taking them on walks in a stroller (not purchased yet) to the parks and water ways that I walk on a daily basis already. I imagine feeding them food that I’ve made for dinner (they like it!) and I’ve imagined reading them a whole bunch of the books that happen to be in the bookshelves in my bedroom, George and Martha, Oliver Pig, the Frances books, all my favorites that I kept in the divorce. It makes me feel very good to imagine being a grandmother.

Then, to my utter astonishment, I have also found my mind wandering to thoughts of traveling I’d like to do. If you’d asked me before this where my bucket list of travel destinations were, I’d have come up with a blank. I saw a lot of the world when I was a teenager in Europe and I find travel to be stressful, especially if there’s a lot of jet lag to deal with. It’s also expensive enough that maybe some part of my brain has refused to go there. But the point of day-dreaming isn’t to think about things that are likely to happen or that you’re going to make happen. It’s just to play with possibilities, and to be happy in a space that you control yourself. So each day I will drift off to the Outer Hebrides and Shetland (thanks to the series!). I have also tried out India and Thailand. Who knew?

And then there is the dream of being wealthy enough to give away money to friends who need it. This is one of those things that I’ve realized probably comes from my dad. As angry as I am at him for not taking care of his own children first, I find that I am growing to understand his drive to help people. In a sense, I might even say that he was creating his own “found family.” While I still get frustrated that he wouldn’t repair the relationships he had damaged by abusing his own children, I do understand the desire to fix something that can be fixed with money. It is also very delicious.

Meditation, when it worked, was good at getting my brain to quiet down. That was helpful, since my brain was determined to tell me negative thoughts about myself, that I was a bad mom, that I had destroyed everything I valued in the world, that no one would even notice if I was gone. But meditation didn’t work at replacing bad thoughts with good ones. I suspect, looking back, that it was trying to do that, but I just couldn’t bring myself to think or chant “You are loved” and “Life is good.”

While I am lying down to day-dream now, I often have to gently re-direct my brain, which wants to remind me of a recent mistake I made at work, or that wants to make a list of things that I need to accomplish today, or that reminds me that everyone hates me because I am a disgusting human being. I don’t try to fight back logically on any of these arguments. It’s just that right now isn’t the time for that to be processed. Right now is devoted only to dreaming of fun things for the future. And once I get started, I am rarely derailed. I can spend all of the time (I set a timer on my phone that goes off with a gentle buzz) on a very specific dream or can jump off of one to another and then another.

Day-dreaming is convincing me that life is actually worth living. Not because it is, but because I am deliberately making myself pretend for a little while, pretending like a little child, that it might be. I can’t control the universe, but I get to control my fifteen minutes of day-dreaming