The power of daydreaming
By Viviana Benfenati.
Everyone has the power to escape reality. The magic behind imagination is a long, sinuous and well paved highway, but only very few adventurers dare to deeply travel and explore it. How much are we aware of this ability of ours is, ergo, a mystery.
Could there be, in the deepest and most recondite corners of our minds, an uncharted and magnificent place waiting for us to discover its true potential?
In the middle of a work meeting, someone happened to be inspired the day before and chose a really eye-catching photograph for the opening slide on the Power point presentation, that landscape has already caught all your senses, before you were even aware of it.
Suddenly, the voice of the meeting moderator starts to disappear, and when you least expect it, the sounds you are hearing are nowhere close to those in the meeting room. Your body and your senses are in two separate places now. What is happening around you is nowhere close to chairs, laptops and working people anymore. You imagine yourself in that photograph, what would the wind feel like, what would you be feeling and thinking, or even what could you encounter if you start wandering around.
Another day, struggling through your daily commute, you finally reach the metro station. You speed down the stairs only to find everything far more crowded than ever. Wondering if maybe this place has turned into a new tourist attraction overnight, you swim through the sea of people until you reach your daily queue. Dragging yourself, you move forward to the end of a line that is now almost thrice as long as usual, since one of the metro units is currently undergoing maintenance.
Attempting to survive amidst an avalanche of heads and a collection of armpits that pose an open threat to your life, a song that you don’t even remember existed starts playing on Spotify. You don’t know at what point you began to fly away from the stress, the smell, the noise, the station, or the fact that you are going to be more than just fashionably late to work. All there is to know now is that you are eight years old again. You are suddenly back to that day, when you held hands with your best friend and her sister, right before jumping in the pool, that afternoon at their grandmother’s house.
You remember how your friend bet she could eat a whole fried egg in one bite and won. You remember how her nana’s house looked like, and what color were the kitchen chairs. You remember how long the grass was and what the orange juice tasted like that day. And, despite your lousy memory, you can distinctly recall her nana’s nine cats, who gladly shared the sunrays with you, lying on the marble floor of the terrace. You can even hear the music on your friend’s colorful radio, overshadowed frequently by the sound of your laughter. You remember how easy it was to be purely, deeply happy.
That day, which would have remained forgotten had it not been for that one song, which transported you back to a moment lost in your memory for more than twenty years.
Each night, before the little girl went to sleep, her mother held the same book while sitting by her side. Yet, the story was different every time. The main characters, far from being trapped in an endless repetition of the same story, prisoners behind those lines of ink stamped on the pages, lived through endless, unimaginable adventures. Journeys that ranged from the fantasy world, which was their home, to events that were part of the life of a preschool girl, to which she could relate. They went to school, they had parties, the got sick, they organized trips and even got to meet some new, supporting characters. The girl looked forward to that moment all day. What would her favorite characters be challenged with this time?
Once the story was over every night and the little girl’s laughter had ceased, it was the moment for bedtime. The girl then closed her eyes with an irrefutable conviction in her mind: her mom was the best for knowing so many stories.
All of these situations lead to the same question: how much is our mind really capable of?
Our imagination is our personal door to a new reality, one that is no less certain than the world we live in. It exists, it feels real, we heard it, we saw it, we even lived in it for a while, and it certainly contributes to shape our perception of life and everything in it. Is the concept of reality, as we know it, relative? Is there more than just one reality?
What would happen if we decide to let loose of the leash of imagination? Would this make a change in the way we live our lives? Could this make us stronger and better equipped to cope with life’s mischievous happenings? Or even, could it change the way we perceive our own selves?
If we leave the door open to this mystical part of our minds, and pay more attention to our deepest dreams and desires, could it be possible for us to find, maybe, our true selves?
This is what this blog is about. Exploring the realms of our imagination, the endless realities we can build with it, and the many different bridges we will find along the way, which grant us the possibility to bring this world of ours into real life. Stories, music, theater, art, writing, travelling, creating, imagining, dreaming. The highway that never ends.
The funny thing, however, is when we can’t control it. When our mind is like this restless, playful animal who is trapped in a cage, say like, a bunny? Each of us has his own witty, mythical bunny who, no matter how big the lock and how thick the bars of the cage, will always outsmart us, finding the way to escape, and get lost. And then we always have to chase it back; back to the meeting, to the metro station, to the real moment.
If we can, of course.
Welcome to The Chernobyl Bunny, my fellow daydreamers!
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