{"id":41808,"date":"2012-11-15T10:00:41","date_gmt":"2012-11-15T15:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=41808"},"modified":"2012-11-16T10:08:55","modified_gmt":"2012-11-16T15:08:55","slug":"daydream-believer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/11\/15\/daydream-believer\/","title":{"rendered":"Daydream Believer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The daydreaming thing was my brother\u2019s fault. He went to Virginia Tech from 1970 to 1975. The fifth year wasn\u2019t because he was dim; as an architecture major he was required to stay ten semesters. Sometime in that span, on one of our eight-hour family trips from New Jersey to drop him off or pick him up, my parents took me to Luray Caverns. I must\u2019ve been about eleven years old.<\/p>\n

God almighty! Who knew they kept all that stuff underground? I was agog! Great dripstone formations that looked like melting candles. Stalactites and mites the shades of fall vegetables and seashells. If Luray wasn\u2019t exactly the hidden world I\u2019d been looking for, it was something close: it was the key that freed my imagination from my own experience. (About three or four years earlier I\u2019d sat straight up in bed one night, shaking from the sudden, unwished-for understanding that one day I would die and there would be no more me on earth. I understood this not only as a personal catastrophe but a tragedy for the world as well. What would it do without me? That moment, I think, paved the way for my imagination to gallop ahead of my life in the here and now. It prepared me for Luray.) <\/p>\n

On the drive home I sat in the back seat of my parents\u2019 Pontiac, staring out the window. But I wasn\u2019t seeing the Blue Ridge. My mind\u2019s eye was still underground, where the beautiful caverns had become my own personal stage set. I peopled them with a brave family whose home had been burned by the British. The American Revolution raged. (I\u2019d been to Williamsburg the year before, and had a head full of eighteenth-century fashions.) My patriots took shelter in the caverns and the hero became a guerilla fighter. I regretfully report that my gender-bound childhood brain could only envision men taking daring action against the redcoats. The women grew mushrooms and crept out to trade them at market for food they brought home to cook in the cavern. I add this with extreme discomfort: I think my hero may have looked like the teen idol Bobby Sherman.<\/p>\n

Had my \u201cdaydream characters,\u201d as I called them, remained a diversion for the drive home, I wouldn\u2019t be writing this essay. They didn\u2019t. Instead they evolved, growing up alongside me and into the social upheavals of the 1970s. My imagination became an adolescent laboratory, grafting ideas from the books I read—especially Gothic-tinged romances on the order of Rebecca<\/em> and Wuthering Heights<\/em>—onto current events like the women\u2019s movement. Feminism entered me by osmosis, and soon I was creating stories with heroines as well as heroes. Here\u2019s a classic, circa age fifteen: orphaned young women meet at a school for governesses in the early nineteenth century; one dresses as a man and attends university to become a doctor, the other marries against her will to save her family from destitution; the doctor sets up a revolutionary clinic to treat the rural poor; the two meet again and fall in love, the married one not realizing her illicit beau is her former best friend.<\/p>\n

At that point I\u2019d generally kill off one or the other of my leads, weeping real tears as the tragedy unfolded in my head. And then I\u2019d wait a few weeks and replay the whole thing.<\/p>\n

These self-told tales came to exert an enormous gravitational pull on my life. One August day I was sitting cross-legged on my bed, struggling to write a summer term paper—I can feel the unjust sting of summertime homework even now—when the storyline I\u2019d been messing around with the night before edged back into my mind. \u201cHmmm,\u201d I thought. \u201cAll right, I\u2019ll give it just ten minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Four hours later I realized, with shame but also a little thrill at the magnitude of my misbehavior, that it was dinnertime and I\u2019d not written a word. The lure of daydreaming was too great, and I\u2019d literally been unable to stop. That was the day I crossed the threshold into narrative addiction.<\/p>\n

I began to look forward to every long car ride. I\u2019d keep myself up at night or set the alarm to wake an hour early in the morning, so I could daydream. I\u2019d borrow against whatever private moments a teenager has—there aren\u2019t many; studying, mainly—in order to hone my craft. As far as I was concerned, my own stories were far better than anything on TV.<\/p>\n

I hope I\u2019ve made clear that my stories weren\u2019t what we usually call \u201cdaydreams\u201d—those momentary, wool-gathering fantasies about classmates or teachers or seeing yourself win the Olympics, the typical fodder of minds unmoored by French prepositions. (I used French class to learn important things, like how to write backwards with my left hand.) No, mine tended to be months- or years-long historical sagas starring characters with intricate family relationships. The heroes and heroines were almost always beautiful and brilliant but deeply flawed, either physically or emotionally. I\u2019d create a situational framework, like my tale of the plucky governesses, and then pick and choose scenes to tell myself whenever I had the chance.<\/p>\n

I narrated these scenes to myself in past tense, third person, with a good deal of conversation (often including \u201che saids\u201d and \u201cshe saids,\u201d of which I was fond). I should also say that I wasn\u2019t involved in these stories in any way. I was never a character in my own daydreams. I was multiple, like Frankenstein\u2019s creature, but only in the sense that I was teller and audience in one.<\/p>\n

Does anyone else out there \u201cdaydream\u201d like this? Ever since I was a teenager I\u2019ve wanted to know if other people tell themselves sagas too. I teach creative writing, and one of my students recently confessed that she \u201cwrites\u201d intricate fictions in her head as well—we looked at one another with astonished relief, like two Martians meeting on earth—but she\u2019s only other serious daydreamer I\u2019ve met. It\u2019s hard even to google the subject: there are no keywords to look up. When I mention my daydreaming habit to people (a rare occurrence), they look at me with a combination of alarm and wonder and inevitably ask, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you write your stories down?\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll get to that soon.<\/p>\n

Most of the time as I was growing up I kept my talent\/habit\/addiction\/vice in check, but whenever I had time alone or reason to procrastinate, I could slip into a serious daydreaming jag. Because my stories were open-ended and unedited, morphing at will as I stole events from life or fiction, they thrillingly—dangerously—went on and on. High school became college, college became grad school, I got a job in Manhattan, and all the while \u201cdaydreaming\u201d was my secret, reflexive habit. I was vaguely aware that my plots often outpaced my experience, anticipating and testing the ground before I walked on it, so to speak. As if life were a half-frozen pond. Sometimes I fretted that I was only half-living my real life. But whenever anything really interesting came up—travels or a love affair, the demands of a new job—my daydreams shrank back and I gave myself to the external world with abandon. I figured I was fine.<\/p>\n

By my midtwenties a fairly sophisticated fiction had taken shape that now, today, has historical roots in my actual life—where and when I\u2019ve authored it, to what degree, at what age—and deep fictional roots of its own. In her memoir Sunbathing in the Rain<\/em>, the Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis refers to what she calls her \u201cneed for a reality away from my ordinary life.\u201d For Lewis, alcohol and poetry (in that order) provided the alternative, though she\u2019s careful to differentiate between them. \u201cI see alcohol as a journey away from reality, into fantasy,\u201d she writes, \u201cand poetry as an indirect route deeper into reality\u2019s hinterland.\u201d For me, equally dependent on the need to reconstitute the found world, daydreaming filled a role—a shapeshifting grey area—between the two.<\/p>\n

Once, after I was nearly killed in a train wreck (for real), I lost my balance between my internal and external worlds. I didn\u2019t confuse them, I simply lost interest in the one that leaves visible traces. It wasn\u2019t exactly a retreat from \u201clife\u201d or activity—daydreaming is a rigorous discipline and demands enormous creative energy and powers of memory, which is why it\u2019s impossible to drink and dream at the same time; believe me, I\u2019ve tried—but it was a retreat from active living.<\/p>\n

At that point in my life I was just setting out to make my way in the world as a freelance writer. (Can you imagine a more fraught choice for an inveterate daydreamer?) Each day I\u2019d get up, eat breakfast with my apartment-mate, she\u2019d leave for work, and I\u2019d settle in the living room with my notes and the latest edition of Writer\u2019s Market. The sun would be streaming in the east windows. The next time I returned to external awareness, let\u2019s call it, the sun was in the west windows and the shadows stretching across our rose-colored carpeting were long and blue. I\u2019d make deals with myself and the clock, like \u201cJust until the big hand reaches a whole number,\u201d but that was like a gambler saying \u201cJust one game.\u201d Whole days disappeared, one after another, for months.<\/p>\n

With the perspective of a quarter century I can see I was probably suffering from posttraumatic stress. At the time I thought I was losing my mind. If only I could write my stories down, I thought, I\u2019d be okay. Words on a page were evidence that you cleaved to the safe side of the line between being crazy and being a fiction writer. When you write down what you make up it\u2019s art, and no one complains. But I couldn\u2019t do it. I lacked the craft tools and I feared that if I tried to capture my characters they\u2019d revolt and disappear. So I just dreamed on. Not long after this period things perked up. Life came and claimed me and I gratefully went with it, and before long I was writing for real—but never about my \u201cdaydreams.\u201d I fully expected as I grew older my stories would disappear, but they\u2019ve only diminished. Wielded carefully, I\u2019ve found they can serve as alchemical tools for converting observation into empathy. I spend whole years without them now, yet they never retreat entirely. Rather they\u2019re contained, like a river canalized, often flowing into darker, more disturbing channels than I have ever ventured myself, filtering the world\u2019s soot out of my soul.<\/p>\n

Pamela Petro\u2019s latest book is<\/em> The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story<\/a>, from which some sections of this essay were drawn. She\u2019s currently working on a novel drawn from her daydreams.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The daydreaming thing was my brother\u2019s fault. He went to Virginia Tech from 1970 to 1975. The fifth year wasn\u2019t because he was dim; as an architecture major he was required to stay ten semesters. Sometime in that span, on one of our eight-hour family trips from New Jersey to drop him off or pick […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":410,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4393],"tags":[9224,9225,9223,2843,3700],"class_list":["post-41808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person","tag-daydreaming","tag-gwyneth-lewis","tag-luray-caverns","tag-rebecca","tag-wuthering-heights"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDaydream Believer by Pamela Petro<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"November 15, 2012 \u2013 The daydreaming thing was my brother\u2019s fault. He went to Virginia Tech from 1970 to 1975. 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