When Fantasy isn’t Reality: Random Musings for the Day

Funny to think that many of my fantasies stem from the Disney films I watched in my childhood. Unfortunately, losing sight of reality happens way too often.

Nearly every night, I fantasize myself to sleep in order to overcome the mild bout of insomnia that keeps me from falling into that pleasant spell of unconsciousness the second my head hits the pillow. Most of these fantasies are happy, but after a while, I recognize the dull nature of my imagination, and falling asleep becomes a struggle again. Fortunately, I have yet to pull an all-nighter, so as dull as some of these fantasies get after a while, they still manage to put me to sleep whether it be twenty minutes after I’ve gotten myself in bed or even a couple hours. On the note of fantasies though, here are a couple of my thoughts on what they’ve done to me.

Fantasies have warped my sense of reality

While I still understand what my reality is, sometimes, depending on how badly I wanted that fantasy to become true, it becomes so extremely difficult for me to see that reality has yet to happen. For me, I typically fantasize about my future, and more specifically, the happy romantic happily ever afters found in pretty much any classic Disney work.

Now that I’m fully thinking about this, Aurora didn’t know her prince at all. Literally. As romantic as it was made in Sleeping Beauty, marrying the stranger who kissed me in my sleep without my permission is pretty preposterous. Isn’t that sexual harassment?

On a more serious note though, I often fantasize on having a perfect love life where there are no problems whatsoever even though I understand that’s guaranteed to be impossible. Perhaps the fire fueling that fantasy comes from my inexperience or complete lack of being in relationships. Honestly, I’m afraid that should the time come where I am in a relationship, I’ll fantasize about whoever this special someone is and forget about his actual, real self. That’s an issue that I’ve read about between couples who found themselves dating their fantasized versions of themselves, and I know that falling prey to idealization is just way too easy for me. However, that’s just going to be something that I’ll try to keep in the back of my mind so that I can be constantly reminded about reality as it is.

It becomes difficult for me not to believe a strong fantasy. 

Most times, these come from dreams that I have about what’s going to happen the next day. Usually, that “next day” has something important to me going on, and I’m either worried or excited about what’s going to happen. The night before a music competition I did a couple weeks ago, I found myself dreaming over and over again about making it past the semi-final round and into the final round. What was worse about this particular dream was that I had it over and over again throughout the night. In a way, it may have been good because I felt that I had the potential to make it to the finals, but it was also worse because in the hours leading up to my semi-final performance, I felt so much pressure from this dream. While this dream did come true, and I was elated to be in the finals, it was still difficult for me to reconcile myself to the pressure that it brought along.

Bad fantasies have me scared of my future reality.

Perhaps this stems from my pessimism, perhaps this stems from my internal acknowledgment of the great uncertainty that lies ahead, I don’t know. At first read, a “bad fantasy” doesn’t seem to make any sense, and it wouldn’t have if I hadn’t actually had bad fantasies of my own. What happens for me at least is me zoning off and fantasizing about something happy and then all of a sudden finding myself landed circumstances that seem to have turned one-eighty degrees around, and all of a sudden, I’m trapped, vulnerable, and scared. Most importantly, being trapped, vulnerable, and scared render me utterly powerless as I continue with the dark sequence of this fantasy until I either manage to get a grip on my consciousness or somehow just completely slip out of it. My worst fantasy involved me attending a college party and then recognizing that I was in an unhealthy environment that I couldn’t get out of. Having never attended any college party or attended college for that matter, this fantasy in particular almost felt like a sort of warning for some ominous storm cloud ready to pass over my head as I enter college next month. Hopefully reality will have better plans for me in the next four years, but for now, I’m still feeling weary and really not all that excited to move into college life.

That’s it for today’s random musings where I go off and put some of my thoughts into words. If you have any comments or feedback on what I wrote, please leave me a comment down below, and if you enjoyed this post, please give it a like. Otherwise, I hope you all a good day! Thanks for reading 🙂