Navigating the complexities of life involves making decisions. Some decisions can have profound consequences for the way life unfolds, so it’s natural to be afraid of making the wrong choice.
We can make choices in a logical, left-brained way, where we carefully list the pros and cons of each option, look at the likely consequences, and choose the path that seems most likely to take us where we want to go. Or, we can make a right-brained choice, where we let our subconscious do all the work, listen to our intuition and make the choice that feels right. The best choices come from doing both – where we find an option that feels right and makes logical sense.
But many daydreamers make real-world choices entirely from a place of logic. And when we do that, we take ourselves out of the equation. We might make the logical, sensible choice, but if that’s not the choice that’s going to make us happy, can we really say that it’s the right choice? We need to at least be in touch with our own needs and feelings and emotions. In other words, we need to learn to at least listen to our subconscious.
But the thing is, our subconscious tends to talk in whispers. And we’re not very good at listening. Our minds are never still. When we spend too much time in our daydream world, our subconscious has fewer opportunities to talk to us about what’s going on in real life. We don’t stop long enough to notice all those little coincidences, all the fleeting random thoughts, which are the language our subconscious uses to speak to us.
We also have a hard time tapping into our feelings. In the context of making a choice, we have to envisage possible future scenarios and sense how we would feel in each case. But when we do that, who is doing the feeling? Is it our real-world selves, or is it our alter egos? We spend so much time being our alter egos that feeling their feelings comes as naturally to us as feeling our own. So we need to remain aware of which of our selves is making the choice, and which has to live with the consequences.
Our daydreams come from our creative right brains. Even if our daydreaming is under control, there’s still a risk that the only way we drop out of a daydream is by dropping into our logical left brains. Viewed as a whole, real-life and daydreams, maybe we have a good balance between logic and creativity, but do we have that balance in each of our worlds? Or are we living real life from a place of logic because our creativity and intuition have someplace better to be?
We need to make sure we can tune into our feelings and our intuition in our real lives. But that doesn’t necessarily mean daydreaming less. Daydreaming is the exercise that keeps our creative right brain active. But we need to use those skills outside the daydream as well.
So many of the thoughts and behaviours we think are automatic are, in fact, the ways that our subconscious tries to keep us safe. Negative feelings are messages from our subconscious that something isn’t right. If we don’t listen to those messages, we can’t make the course corrections necessary for our lives to improve.
We need to make an effort to tune into our subconscious, to listen to and to trust our intuition. And to do that, we sometimes – just sometimes – need to stop daydreaming long enough to be really present with ourselves. We need to compassionately ask ourselves how we’re feeling and what we need. We have to let our minds be still and just see what comes up. We should honour the person we are in real life and not just the person we become in our daydreams. And then, perhaps, we can finally get to know our real-life selves.