It's Finally Summer. Here's Your Permission Slip To Let Your Fantasies Run Wild
On imagination as a tool for resilience, summer fruit, and taking your desires seriously
When I think about what makes life worth living—the flesh and bones and beating heart of the human experience—I think about summertime.
Maybe it’s because some of my life’s happiest moments were spent between the months of June and August. Or maybe it’s that I run cold, and summer is an opportunity to shed my signature black turtlenecks and exist comfortably in my own body again. Perhaps I’m just a sucker for a good piece of fruit and a day by the river. Whatever the case may be, there’s nothing that can convince me otherwise: summer is the best season of the year.
But it’s not just about the long days and the river swims and the feeling of peach juice running freely between my fingers. Summer is, at least for me, the season for unadulterated fantasy. It’s the season for swinging open the gate of your mind and letting your wildest thoughts run unabated across the mustard-dotted hillsides.
Summer’s endless days and gentle nights are a wide-open invitation: think about what you really want and steep in those thoughts relentlessly. It’s for blurring the boundary between fact and fiction.
What’s the correlation between fantasizing and summertime? There’s no scientific answer, but I think it’s that summer stretches out space and time and bids you relax, creating the perfect conditions for concocting blissed-out daydreams. Think about it: work slows down, people start going on vacation, and rising temperatures invite bolder thoughts into the brain.
So, yes, I’m advocating for loosening your grip on reality this summer. (Just don’t let go of it entirely, please.) I’m advocating for allowing your mind to unhinge and unravel in ways you didn’t think were previously possible. You don’t need permission, but I’ll give it to you anyway: go ahead and fantasize this summer.
Fantasizing, as it turns out, can be pretty good for you. When the world was still deep in the throes of the pandemic, daydreaming about better days ahead was the only thing that kept me (relatively) sane. Back then, I’d spread a beach towel out in my backyard in East L.A., attempting to drown out the deafening din of the helicopters above with my own thoughts.
I’d think about what life might look like once the pandemic ended. I imagined running away to a sangria-soaked beach in Spain, meeting beautiful strangers there and dancing with them until sunrise. I thought about the stories I’d write that would, at the very least, make people feel something. Daydreaming about a beautiful future injected me with a sort of optimism that better days were just around the corner.
I wasn’t the only one indulging in the desire to daydream. The New York Times published a piece in 2021 (aptly titled Go Ahead. Fantasize.) that profiled people doing exactly that: letting their thoughts go wild.
The article does a good job of explaining why fantasizing is actually good for you. Here’s an excerpt:
“The important thing about imagination is that it gives you optimism,” said Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the Positive Psychology Center there.
His work is dedicated to studying human agency, which is predicated on efficacy, optimism and imagination. (When Dr. Seligman was president of the American Psychological Association in 1998, he pushed for moving away “from focusing on what’s wrong to what makes life worth living.”)
The hours spent fantasizing and daydreaming about future plans are valuable, Dr. Seligman said. They allow people to escape routine, and cultivate hope and resilience. Imagination also helps people live a “good life,” which Dr. Seligman has found is greatly influenced by positive thinking, emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishments — or what he calls PERMA.
“Imagining the future — we call this skill prospection — and prospection is subserved by a set of brain circuits that juxtapose time and space and get you imagining things well and beyond the here and now,” Dr. Seligman said. “The essence of resilience about the future is: How good a prospector are you?”
The cool thing about this is that you don’t need to be in the midst of a global pandemic to wield your imagination as a tool for resilience. Optimism and hope are great things to have on reserve regardless of your circumstances. But beyond cultivating resilience, I’d also argue that allowing yourself to fantasize empowers you to take your own pleasure seriously.
Don’t be ridiculous, I’m not just talking about sexual fantasies and pleasure. (But we can certainly make a case for that, too.)
I’m talking about embracing the pleasure of doing the things you really love. It’s the kind of pleasure we all deny ourselves out of fear of rejection, failure, and other kinds of nonsense. Fantasizing about what we really want—whether it’s to try our hand at a new skill or jet off to another country—exposes us to those very concepts over time. The more we brew in those thoughts and get comfortable with them, the more we might begin to take them seriously.1
What will you fantasize about this summer? Personally, I’ll be daydreaming about swimming in alpine lakes, baking a stone fruit galette, and indulging in swooning summer romances worth writing novels about—or at least a poem or two.2
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next month. HAGS!
I have no scientific research to back this up, but I figured if it’s true for me, maybe it’s true for more of us.
By the way. If you haven’t already, you can check out my debut poetry collection, Summer Fruit, for that yearning-for-a-summer-romance type feel.