About Daydreams

This entry serves as part two to the entry I wrote yesterday on my lunchbreak at work. I've come to realize throughout my adulthood that I spend nearly every second of my day when I'm not either with R. or my dad daydreaming. The sad part is that I'm not exaggerating. My job is one that once you know it, you can pretty much think about whatever you want, and I do. It doesn't help the fact that I listen to music and podcasts simultaneously while I am daydreaming. This is why during the few times I've been fired in my life, I've just sort of shrugged and walked out—I'm not really there to begin with. 

These daydreams usually fall into three categories: intrusive thoughts, possible scenarios, and a category I'll call encyclopedia entries, that is, when I obsessively think about all of the things I read about during my downtime. 

Of these categories, the intrusive thoughts one is the most jarring and destructive to my day. I regularly daydream about disturbing things, things I'd never really do, but that seem to come to the forefront of my mind more often than not. I've read that this can be a sign of anxiety or OCD, which is a real possibility considering my Type A personality. These intrusive thoughts are themselves of two varieties: things I definitely shouldn't say, and things I definitely shouldn't do. 

Intrusive Thoughts

Oftentimes things come into my head that are just awful things to say. Curse words. Random things I think about other people. They always come into my head as a question, followed by a desperate attempt to keep myself from doing it: "What would happen if I yelled this out right now? Don't yell this out. Don't yell this out. DO NOT yell this out."

Then there are things I definitely shouldn't do but think about. When I'm at the grocery store I often wonder what would happen if I were to just shove the person in the aisle in front of me into the shelf. (Or rather, I know what would happen, but I wonder how it would feel.) How would it feel to just sweep your arm across the cracker shelf and knock all of the boxes down simultaneously? If I went to the meat department and started licking all of the packages of meat, would I get some horrible disease and die? 

Sometimes the daydreams are self-destructive: Just open the car door and jump out. Open the autoclave door and crawl in. Open the sharps container at the doctor's office and stick your hand in.

Possible Scenarios

I find possible scenarios the most interesting. When I quit one of my many jobs, I had a brief stint cleaning offices at night. This job brought me into contact with a lot of diplomas, family pictures, and other office memorabilia. I used to look at their diplomas for example and think, I wonder if my life would have been different if I had this degree instead of my degree in social work. I wonder what kind of job I could get, apart from this one. Or looking at their family photos—I wonder what their house looks like. I wonder if they mow their lawn on the weekend in diagonal stripes. Then I imagine myself working in their office. I think about what kind of view I'd have from their little office window. I wonder what kinds of clothes I would wear everyday. Would I go out of my way to dress up like I always do when I go out of the house, or would the quotidian become so mindless I'd no longer care what I wore? 

Sometimes these scenarios have no basis in any current reality. One of the most prominent of these is my ongoing daydream about moving to Bath, either with my husband or after I am inevitably widowed.  If I were widowed, I'd buy a historical house and just live in it as a recluse. Forever. I'm sure there would be rumors started about me by curious neighbors who see me only through the lilac bushes. Rumors that say I'm a witch, or that I used to own a small candy store that inadvertently made me rich and afforded me the historical house, or that I am a black widow who marries and kills men for the insurance money.

Then there's romantic possible scenarios. These I have found the most guilt-inducing, as I am happily married and would never leave my husband, but I'm starting to think that these types of daydreams are part of the human experience. What would it be like to be married to this person? If we started spending more time together, would we fall in love? I wonder if her lips feel soft. Would he take me to an old theater where we could watch a silent film and snuggle?

Encyclopedia Entries

It is no secret that I've been a voracious reader since I was a small child. I read nearly anything I can get my hands on—good and bad. A lot of times during the day I think about all of the things I read:

I go over long, drawn-out scenarios about what Yukiko Okada's life would be like had she not jumped from the Sun Music building at the age of 18. Could she have been saved? Would she have continued to sing idol music during the remainder of her youth, and then transition to a more adult sound as she aged?

Or I think about missing people: What happened to the Springfield Three? Where are they buried? Who kidnapped them, and why? What happened to Dorothy Arnold?—Was she really murdered, or did she spend the rest of her life writing books in anonymity in a foreign country? 

Sometimes I don't think about people at all, I think about things: I wonder who decided to put the radio tower in Bath, North Carolina. Is there a secret radio station there as well, hidden in some tiny brick building? Is there a numbers station there? 

Is the siren-looking apparatus on Roxboro Rd. a relic from the Cold War? 

Are there nefarious things going on in the windowless phone company building? 

Today at work I didn't even listen to music throughout most of my shift because I thought that I would look less distracted. This just gave my brain more time to think about things. Sometimes I am worried that I'm going to run a red light or pass a stopped school bus on my drive home because of how distant my thoughts are. But it seems as though the more I try to be present in the here-and-now, the less I want to be present. Things are so much more interesting in my head.