Following on from last week’s post about making our lives in the in-between and unfinished, I want to talk today about daydreaming, which seems to me a good friend to the creative soul.

There was a time in my life when I was seventeen and full of the self-importance of adolescence. There would be all these dramas unfolding each day and endless phone calls about who fancied who, who was going to wear what, and what we would do on Saturday night.

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Quite often I would return from college and lie on my bed and daydream. I used to lie there for 40 minutes or so, daydreaming, perhaps napping, thinking about the day, and letting my thoughts wander. It felt like a liminal space, a place on the threshold, where the conscious met the unconscious, where reality merged with dream. It was a place where all the events of the day were played back on rewind. It felt like an untangling of experience and now that I think about it, it brings to mind this from Virginia Woolf:

'By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.'

(A Room of One's Own)

Sometimes, when you are hemmed in by circumstance, there is no time to analyze, to gain distance and perspective. These days, the time for wondering and pontificating has been snatched away by mobile phones (and also parenting!) These days, we don't idle, we scroll. When was the last time you waited in a queue or at a train platform without whipping out your phone? When was the last time you sat alone in a cafe, without scrolling? Our phones have become our emotional safety blankets. We are never alone anymore, with ourselves or our thoughts.

We fool ourselves into believing that we are being super-efficient by using every microsecond of our day, but really, does it edify you to watch that video of babies laughing or of people falling over on muddy walks? Most phone time is a distraction. In the smartphone era, we take on so much useless information that our brains never asked for, and in doing so, we have neglected to make space to ponder.

During the winter lockdown, I wrote this poem out of the sheer frustration of not being able to have even a thought to myself!

It is 2021 and I wonder

what is the point of getting up is

when there is nothing to do.

Each day the children ask

‘What are we doing today?’

and I say nothing,

there’s nothing we can do.

So we bake and fold laundry,

watch Star Wars.

Each day, my words are

stifled staccatos,

cut across by need, rage, pain.

The only respite is the evening,

where my thought meanders

like a line of ink,

and I have the time to follow

where it leads.

In the life of the creative, we need to learn to let ourselves be idle. Even this has a purpose: letting our thoughts wander is the practice of letting our subconscious speak to us.

Creativity is a meeting place of ideas. When we daydream and let our thoughts run, we are letting them intermingle and talk to each other. We are taking a backseat and letting our subconscious do the hard work for us. Sometimes this happens while out walking, sometimes when washing up.

Another thing that this liminal dreaming space was good for was processing the things that have happened. In May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude, she says:

'I feel cluttered when there is no time to analyze experience. That is the silt – unexplored experience that literally chokes the mind.'

As a busy parent, there are no margins in the day. I wake at 6.15 and it is go go go until 8 pm when I get back from my daughter’s gym class or my son’s football training. There is no downtime and no time to think. When I am at work, it is so busy that I forget about everything else, when I am at home, I forget about my creative life. How can we make space to weave our lives into a unified whole with enough time for everything?

I think that as creatives we need bigger spaces to hold our thoughts in. So how can we make space to daydream? If you’re a regular reader of Miners, you will probably already know what I'm going to say..!

Grab yourself a journal. Write down your long and complicated feelings and pontifications on life. Get them down in their entirety.

Let yourself be bored. Go phoneless. Let your mind wander.

Stare unto thin air. Walk or just sit at a window, steaming cuppa in hand, watching the world go by. I'm sure it will speak to you.

You may not even notice these changes, but you may find in them a little breathing space. You may even find your mind taking leaps that you had not previously imagined.

Thanks so much for reading Miners, and please recommend it to a friend if you enjoy it!

Elisabeth

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Miners is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.