I’m not sure how other people’s inner lives work; this remains one of the great human mysteries.
But, for me, I used to be highly motivated by my daydreams; they were the spark to life, my forward impetus, and frequently influenced by exciting stories I’d seen in Hollywood movies. I could be an astronaut — why not (“The Right Stuff”)? I could get my pilot’s license (“Space Cowboys”) — why not? These days, that imagination has a shut-off switch. I’m unable to gin up a good daydream because as soon as my cortical system starts to dream, my skeptical prefrontal cortex intrudes with a fact-check and the dream disappears: Poof! I’m not going to be an astronaut. I’m not going to pilot a bush plane ferrying lifesaving medical aid to hungry people in the Horn of Africa.
One of the great pleasures of youth was to imagine the future on long walks fueled by rock-and-roll. Most of my daydreams were about romance, of course: Maybe I would meet Colin Firth while out on Gardiner’s Bay digging, fetchingly, for hard-shell clams? Sometimes my daydreams were a bit more rudimentary — short, implausible snippets of scenes in which, basically, I made a stunning display of cool in front of the people (men!) who inhabited my inner dream world. In my early 20s, when I lived in the East Village, I’d put a Blondie cassette in my Sony Walkman and walk clear across Lower Manhattan, from Avenue B to the Hudson River, visualizing in my mind’s eye what I’d wear (the boots, the tattered denim, the vintage aviator sunglasses) when I stepped out of a car I didn’t actually own (a beat-up convertible MG), cowboy boots stepping out of the car onto the dust of the Sonoran Desert, to the silent appreciation of Michel Chandler of the band the Raunch Hands, who had been waiting for me at a gas station.
The 1980s style signifiers of that remembered daydream (cowboy boots, convertible, and a gas station) in this true and veracious account are humorous in retrospect. It is hard to believe that I ever daydreamed myself into cowboy boots. Lolz, as kids say!
The problem with daydreaming as an older person was revealed to me more than 10 years ago. As long ago as that. (Ten years without a romantic daydream? Can this be true?) I remember it was a late-June night when the air was perfumed with honeysuckle, not faint honeysuckle, but so sweet and full it was like swimming in it, and the night was so still that the waves hitting the ocean beach a mile away were a rolling roar. That was a sound and a smell I’d loved so much, always loved, and I could feel the air cool on my neck, so delicious a night air. June. June! How many nights like this had I, when I was younger, smelled the honeysuckle and stopped in my tracks to listen for the waves in the distance, and imagined meeting a man down at the bottom of the garden, in the dark, to sit on the damp grass and kiss? Well. What are you to do with a night and an air like that when you understand that it is no longer practical to expect high romance? Maybe I have in my future a dinner date with someone I knew in high school, but it’s not going to be Julian Sands in a field of barley and poppies in Tuscany.
This honeysuckle revelation came as I was walking from the car around midnight at the end of a long road trip with my then-small children, carrying three empty plastic lemonade bottles, my thumb and two fingers jammed into them; I also carried a knapsack and shoulder bag, and a baseball cap and brown-paper bag in my other hand, and when the honeysuckle hit me full in the face, I winced and turned my head, as you turn your head when you pass the place in a road where someone you knew died in an accident.
It does not escape my attention that the daydreams of my younger days focused a lot of attention on appearance, both mine and that of the dream men. My good looks were always improved in the daydream fantasy: I was thinner. I guess I began stopping myself from indulging in these mental scenes around the time of my late 30s, when the gap between fantasy and reality became — in the opinion of my discriminating prefrontal cortex — so great that the spell of imagining was snapped by the distance. I can’t think of the last time I listened to “Rip It Up” by Bill Haley and His Comets and imagined meeting a young Russell Crowe, jive dancing at a crowded party in a smoke-filled apartment.
If I have an irrepressibly and unreasonably unrealistic daydream these days, in my 50s, it strictly revolves around winning the lottery. I’m not even kidding! I can still enjoy a good daydream about paying off my second-half property taxes and being able to afford a landscaper who will not just mow the meadow that my lawn has become but also tame the unruly hedge in front of my house, which does indeed have a few straggling honeysuckle vines and wild rose vines tangled in it, but has become so tall and leggy it reminds me of nothing so much as Einstein’s hair.