In Need of Daydreams
"Time spent with oneself is never time wasted."
Tessa Lili Augsberger is a 21-year-old writer from Los Angeles and editor of The New Critic studying history at Dartmouth College.
I sit alone in the waiting room of my mother’s doctor’s office. I stare at my shoes, and at the floral patterns on the carpeted floor. I wonder who chose the floral shag carpet, just as I wonder about the man sitting across from me, and if he is looking up my skirt. I decide not to care and continue gazing at my navel. I do not ponder sex or power. I simply observe the floral pattern on the carpet, and that doctor’s offices purposefully choose uncomfortable chairs, and how the lady at the front desk must have woken up early in order to make it to work on time, given the traffic in the valley. Her accent betrays her origins.
I hear my mother’s voice at the counter behind the waiting room door as she trades her insurance card for medicine, and I think how that could be anyone’s voice. I try to hear her voice as a stranger would, and I perceive it to be remarkably friendly, and rather like the receptionist’s. I suppose she must have lived here a long time if her voice has started to match the woman from the valley’s.
I swing my legs beneath me, and I look down the row of silver spindles on the trapezoidal chairs lined along the wall. I recall being seven years old, my socks lettuce-topped and ribbed along the ankles. My sneakers are pink and sparkling on the side, and I am waiting for my mother to pick me up from — somewhere.
Just as soon as my socks become lettuce-topped, I am taken out of the reminiscence; I am twenty-one years old again, and I am waiting for my mother to come out of her appointment. I am doing the same thing now as I was at seven: I am thinking. I am contemplating the carpeting. I am not thinking of anything important, interesting, or noteworthy; the only reason I recall that particular train of thought is that my once-common habit of considering my shoes, whether at seven or at twenty-one, is rather alien to me now.
Our generation spends hardly any time with ourselves. Distractions have always existed, but the ease and acceptability of today’s diversions puts them in another category altogether. As I write this, I sit behind a set of girls about my age who are alternating between scrolling through Instagram at an alarming rate and texting one another in a group chat, their blue nail-polished fingers expertly maneuvering around their phone screens, tapping and dragging at will — it is as though their phones are extensions of their minds. Even as soon as they consider whether to scroll Twitter, their fingers spider their way across the screen to tap the app open before engaging in a complex dance of drag-tap-drag-hold to close it and reopen Instagram. Their faces alight with blue and pink in due time. Now one watches Cierra Ortega look sultrily over her shoulder; now the other watches Alix Earle apply makeup.
I watch them as they watch their screens. Like a voyeur, I find myself in a metaphysical zoo. I perceive these two as foreign entities in much the same way as they watch the smiling strangers on their phones. It occurs to me one would watch otters in their tank in much the same way these two girls watch the influencers confined to their screens — entranced. One of the girls then opens the same Instagram post she hovered over before. “View your stats,” it says. She swipes through the entire carousel of slides, zooming in every so often on a dress or face as it catches her eye — she is looking at her own Instagram post. At least she is spending time with herself, I think.
Drag-tap-drag-hold — none of what the girls are doing requires coherent thought. We are all zombies, but that is nothing new. Our parents have preached the same truths many times before. But the pregnant woman beside me scrolls, too, navigating Amazon Prime in anticipation of major deals for Prime Day. The woman next to the pregnant lady, in a Covid mask with musical instruments on it and a brace on her right wrist, does the crossword puzzle. Both divert themselves to pass the time. Several people gaze into space with headphones on. A few people converse. As far as I can see, no one simply stares out the large, paneless windows, plainly focused on the passing scenery and their own thoughts — because it is boring, maybe. Because it is time wasted, perhaps. Because they have had a long day and they are too tired to think, probably.
I’ll grant that the bus is not everyone’s ideal place for thinking. But if not here, where one is sandwiched between obligations and has no expectations to perform, then where? Where do the girls refreshing and re-refreshing their own Instagram posts in the row in front of me go to think? One’s instinct might tell them that the girls need to be properly alone in order to think — in other words, that seclusion is a prerequisite for communing with the self. This is not the case, for seclusion does not guarantee the achievement of being alone with one’s thoughts. Even in seclusion, we tend to engage in all manner of distraction. Think about the last time you were alone, or at least not surrounded by people you knew. What were you doing? Were you on the bus, scrolling on your phone? Were you walking through the city, music humming in your ears? Perhaps you were reading a Substack on your computer? Perhaps you were perusing a book? Chances are, unless it was the moment right before you fell asleep, you were distracted.
Such compulsions for diversion from our own thoughts are nothing new. Though the vehicles for their actualization have changed over the years, the effect remains the same: the time we spend nominally alone is actually time shared — with the cacophonous voices of online pundits, the comforting registers of our favorite television characters, the aspirational jauntiness of confident influencers. But shared time prevents us from being deep in our own heads.
Often, though not always, we choose to share our alone time — with other people, with the idea of other people on our phones — to ward off impending feelings of internal loneliness. It is often said that our generation is more isolated than any generation preceding us. Though social media facilitates an ease of digital connectivity unlike the world has ever seen, such nominal acquaintances fail to translate to meaningful relationships with other people. Covid substantiated this mode of existence, excusing the trade-off between face-to-face interactions in favor of fulfilling our loneliness with digital noise and simulated company. But you know all this already — such platitudes are repeated ad nauseam.
Still, you know that you can be lonely in the presence of other people. Sometimes being immersed in a sea of people only serves to increase our own feelings of isolation. Likewise, you know the best scrolling on Instagram can do for you is occupy your time. If you’re really lucky, it may even allow you to live vicariously through someone else’s life — to picture yourself living real life, instead of actually living it. It does nothing to ease your loneliness, just as spending time with others is not some all-encompassing solution to our generation’s woes.
Covid was never the cause of our loneliness; we were isolated before — the lockdown only hardened our habits. Phones themselves are not the problem. Phone usage facilitates distraction, making it easier to procrastinate and to spend time refreshing pictures of ourselves, but phones represent only a sliver of the difficulty. Distraction, in the broadest sense of the word, is the problem. We are not the loneliest generation — we are the most distracted generation. The solution, then, is not to spend time with more people, to fill your alone time with more noise. The solution is to spend better time with yourself. The best way to do this is to daydream.
We have forgotten how to daydream, that oft-maligned creative’s fetish. Perhaps this is because we misunderstand what it entails. The very dictionary considers daydreaming an indulgence. Daydreaming is defined as an avenue for distracting oneself, ostensibly from reality; “concentration” and “focus” are often listed as its antonyms. But we misunderstand daydreaming if we conceptualize it as occurring at anything but the most upper echelons of focus; it is the cleanest form of concentration, a purity of thought. When we daydream, we think for thinking’s sake and our own thinking’s sake alone.
Daydreaming helps us conceptualize ourselves expansively and yet concretely; it allows us to conceive of ourselves as some amalgamative entity — but an entity nonetheless — by defining ourselves in terms of our own thoughts. In this way, daydreaming defines our existence. And we do not do nearly enough of it. Fortunately, daydreaming is easy to do. It does not even require being alone. In fact, daydreaming requires only two parameters, both of which reinforce the other: a lack of distractions and a surplus of intentionality.
The distractions we consider the most “mindless” pose the greatest threat to our daydreams. We trick ourselves into thinking that we can multitask — that we can “relax” at the same time as we shop online, that we can “reset” by watching sports — but multitasking is a proven way to fail. Such distractions do not heal us — they only drain us further. They do not give us room to think, and they certainly do not allow us to relax. One cannot hear oneself think at the same time as one refreshes and re-refreshes the news; such an act is akin to channel surfing — a top-tier distraction back in the day — and no one can think with that grey and white static in their ears. Such allegedly mindless distractions are the most sinister ones because they lull us into a false sense of security in which the things we are ostensibly doing for ourselves turn out not to benefit us at all. The only thing they help us do is procrastinate the act of spending meaningful time in our heads.
Art is different, for it, too, facilitates a closer understanding of the self. But though art — both the creation and consumption of it — facilitates deep introspection, it does not fall under the jurisdiction of the daydream. One is not daydreaming as one consumes or produces art — one is thinking, one is pondering, one is dreaming perhaps, but one is not daydreaming, for daydreaming is a kind of focused unfocused-ness that requires one’s entire attention. One cannot daydream at the same time as they watch a movie — this is simply the act of watching a movie. One cannot write and daydream at the same time — that is called writing. It might appear that one can, however, listen to music or draw in a sketchbook at the same time as one daydreams. But though passive consumption might appear to facilitate daydreaming — at least more than active consumption like reading a book or watching a movie — daydreaming exists outside of art. Just as we have learned to conflate being alone with loneliness, we are often taught that any time not spent consuming is time wasted. But mistaking art for daydreaming only banishes our flights of fancy to forgotten corners of the mind, where they rot and grow less vibrant with the passing years. Music, painting, cinema, and reading — they all have their place when it comes to deepening our experiences of the world, but they are not daydreaming. When one daydreams, one spends concentrated time with oneself, unmediated by any third-party. Daydreaming is an act of processing, of funneling, of sifting one’s thoughts through experience, memory, reflection, romance, and feeling, but unlike art, it is not a creative endeavor; it needs no partner. Rather, daydreaming serves no one’s ends but its own. It is the explicit act of tending to oneself, and only oneself.
Of course, there is no such thing as a true vacuum of one’s mind — our brains are always sensing, feeling, assessing any possible threat. Once we stop taking in novel inputs altogether, we cease to be; we must take in new information to live. But when daydreaming, one recedes from the tangible world of inputs and instead generates a world of their own. One must be mindful, while in the act, not to focus on directing their thoughts toward any one particular subject but to allow their mind to wander, to flit from thought to thought. Within the canopy of a daydream, perhaps the mind will catch itself on the branch of a thought and stay there; perhaps the mind will continue onto leafier subjects entirely. Either way, the mind must be given leave to flit, or not flit, as it pleases. That is not to say that daydreaming is an act of distraction. It is saved from this fate by having a central purpose — that is, to daydream as an end in itself.
The act of daydreaming enables us to do all those things one pretends to do on their phone: to reset properly, to relax, to feel less lonely. Time spent with oneself is never time wasted. It might sound counterintuitive to spend time alone, secluded within the realm of the mind, to ameliorate loneliness, but it is not. In one regard, at least, daydreaming is the only way not to feel lonely. The daydreamer, the person who seeks out intentional time with themselves to think without a specific end in sight, does not do so out of self-interest and a misaligned sense of purpose, but rather out of necessity. Whether the self is informed externally remains a debate, but there is no question about where one’s selfhood dwells: just as one’s external self exists in the perception of others, invisible to ourselves, one’s internal self exists within one’s being, beyond the reach of anyone else. One’s inner world does not engage with others when one interacts with a crowd, converses with strangers, or spends time with friends. As this interior place can only be reached — can only be accessed as a wholly perceived entity — by oneself, daydreaming alone allows us to engage it.
If one imagines this deeper self as a garden, then daydreaming is the act of cultivating that inner world. It is easy to simply enjoy the garden, just as it is easy to spend time on the gentle surface plane of one’s existence. Anyone may enjoy the beauty of the flowers and the quiet of the scenery as they stroll. Anyone can revel in the calm imposed by symmetrical bridges over gentle ponds. But one may not enjoy the garden to its fullest advantage unless one takes the time to cultivate it. If one fails to cultivate one’s inner self, then one only gropes about their most superficial layer for enjoyment, blind to the needs and preferences of their own landscape. In so doing, one is bound to let more than a few flowers wither.
The best landscapers understand their garden as they understand a friend: they find stillness in the pond, simplicity in the sand garden, transience in the seasonal plantings, and perspective in the bench perched neatly beneath the Birch trees on the water. Since the self is to the garden what daydreaming is to the garden’s care, a healthy sense of self requires nothing less than the weathered daydreamer, that gardener who understands their inner world better than anyone because they take the time to tend it. To develop one’s inner self — rather, in order to continually discover oneself — one must spend time with oneself outside the internet, even outside art. One must daydream. True knowledge of one’s inner self is not easy, but its cultivation is certainly worth the cost of suspending the mill of consumption and distraction. One must allow one’s mind to wander along its own contours. Any good groundskeeper knows they must tour their property daily in order to ensure the health and safety of their ward. So it is with daydreaming and the well-being of the self.
As the algorithms of digital life come to trespass on our tactile lives, our ability to think freely declines in proportion. We have built castles of distraction to moat against the isolation of our twenty-first century lives, and we have lost our relationships with ourselves in the process. In an effort to ditch loneliness, we have surrounded ourselves with so much atmospheric noise that we have forgotten the pleasure, and necessity, of our own company. But we cannot afford to suffocate our relationships to ourselves through distractions designed to refract self-image and induce vicarious experience. We merit more living than that.
The private act of thinking is sacred. One’s head is a room of one’s own, worth a kingdom’s weight in gold. A friend of mine remarked the other day that the characters in modern books have lost their colors in comparison to the nineteenth century’s novelistic heroes. While I hope I can chalk such a statement up to my friend reading entirely the wrong sort of books, we are in a sorry state indeed if we must even stop to consider whether he is right. We perceive our time, so summarily reduced to fiefdom, to be worthless unless we occupy our minds with something — anything! Being is no longer enough. We have forgotten how to exist within ourselves. If Pip Pirrip could stalk Estella Havisham’s Instagram at all times of day, would he ever have understood his great expectations? We are afraid, perhaps, of spending intimate time with ourselves. But we should be more afraid of forgetting to forge ourselves by neglecting our monstrous, magnificent, ghastly, glorious daydreams. It can be daunting to spend time alone in one’s head between the hedgerows of the garden — one never knows what they might find.
But then again, one never knows what they might find.
I think this essay is the ideal outcome of a liberal arts education
Love the ending sentence! I wonder what you think about writing in relation to solitude. For me it can sometimes be an alienating process… perhaps it depends.