SUNDAY, 8 DECEMBER 2024

We’re strange creatures, poets and artists. We spend so much of our lives in fantasy worlds, and if we’re one of the lucky few, we even get paid for it. But this power to escape the world of rocks and stones is not only true of artists. It’s true of almost every human being, even the greatest dullard.

I suppose this ability to fantasise is the logical outcome of big brains that enable us to step outside the reality around us and imagine ourselves in different places and times. I don’t think this is unique to us as a species, but it is clearly far more highly developed in humans. In evolutionary terms, this has been a roaring success judging by the way we have planted our footprint firmly upon the whole planet. As individuals, though, it is a mixed blessing. Fantasy can take us to heavens of joy, refreshing us when we are tired and lifting us above the tedium of mundane reality. But it can also lead to terror, imagined hells with their terrifying shadows and demons and instruments of torture.

The greatest bonus of fantasising is the creativity it nurtures. We can step beyond the physical world around us to create imagined worlds, a cultural universe which is full of meaning and every bit as real as those rocks and stones. I’m not talking only about the glories of Art and the discoveries and inventions of science, but simpler things which enrich our everyday lives, such as diversions and games. But even this has its drawbacks: it is creative, after all, to invent and use those instruments of torture, and fantasy increases our opportunity to be cruel and inhumane. Perhaps it even enhances it because it enables us to imagine what the other person is feeling and offers us the pleasure of sensing how their pain is experienced inside. Perhaps it is an inevitable side-effect of those big brains and is the wellspring of our capacity for cruelty.

One of the obvious areas where this is true is sex. Whereas many other species have a very small window when mating occurs, and even when it does occur it is often quick and perfunctory, we are sexually receptive more or less twenty-four hours a day, and, as the cliché goes, the biggest sexual organ is the brain. I sometimes go on gay chatrooms and at first I was genuinely shocked by the prevalence of fetishes and fantasies on there: spanking and bondage, slave markets, humiliation, being the slut in group sex sessions, sex in public places, sadism and masochism, exhibitionism and voyeurism – almost the only thing that wasn’t on the menu very much was ‘normal’, everyday sex with a regular partner. Perhaps this is because only a certain type of person uses sexual chatrooms, but I doubt it; I suspect that these fantasies are common, even in the dreariest cul-de-sacs of suburbia. I also doubt whether this is peculiar to being gay and suspect a lot of straight chatrooms harbour a similar range of secret, exotic delights.

Of course this doesn’t mean that people would necessarily want to live out these fantasies in reality: the realm of fantasy is a garden protected behind a wall and this is much of its attraction. It is simultaneously dangerous and safe, like a roller-coaster ride at the fair. It also offers the frisson of transgression. To what extent this is due to societal taboos about sex and to what extent it is a natural feature of human behaviour is probably an indefinable calculus, but the childish pleasure in breaking the rules and being naughty breathes life into sexual adventures and games.

Romance and happy-ever-after is the flip side of this sexual darkness, but it is every bit as much of a fantasy. The title I chose for this essay comes from the lyrics of a Beach Boys song, Disney Girls, which captures perfectly what many would see as darker sexual urges sublimated beneath bouquets of roses and valentine cards. Personally, I have my doubts about this concept of the ‘Beast Within’, (I am currently reading an excellent book by Mary Midgley which questions this assumption), and I prefer to see these two types of fantasy – the saccharine and the tart – as co-existing rather than one being the romantic wrapping paper which serves as a respectable veneer to conceal the true animal inside.

Fantasies also take more banal forms, closer to daydreams and wish-fulfilment: winning the lottery, getting a promotion, telling our boss exactly what we think of him, and so on. These tend to be less complex because the emotions involved do not conflict with each other in the way that sexual fantasies often do, or threaten our self-image as a nice, decent, civilised human being. They are pleasant in the way that a cool beer on a hot day is pleasant. I suppose some people might argue that they deflect us from taking action since we seek refuge in them instead of confronting and changing an unfulfilling life (or really telling our boss some hard home truths). But if we imagine life without the comfort these flights of fancy offer, it seems tedious and bleak.  

This raises a key question: is our ability to fantasise a benefit overall because we can vicariously enjoy things that we wouldn’t want to do in real life, things which might threaten social harmony if they became commonplace, or is it harmful because it is a retreat from truth, a refusal to face up to reality? Do fantasies sustain us through times of unhappiness and loneliness and mental pain or do they trap us in unreal dead-ends and repetitive, often obsessive rituals of behaviour? The obvious answer is both, of course, and we must judge individually whether we have a healthy balance of reality and fantasy in our lives. It is not an easy judgement call to make.

A key downside to our ability to step outside our immediate reality is that it means we can regret the past and worry about the future. ‘Live in the moment’ is a motto often propounded by self-help gurus, but this is far easier said than done because in order to thrive in the world, or simply to survive, we need to continually reflect upon the past and make plans for the future. People often write about the benefits of meditation in helping us to find that ability to live in the moment and not inside the cage of our everyday mind, but I suspect that this release from the strictures of time and place can only ever be short-lived, and fantasy can also provide this temporary escape, although perhaps in a less healthy way.

Finally, I’d like to look at the question whether modern life is reducing our ability to fantasise creatively, in a capitalist world which packages our fantasies so that they become standardised, homogenised and monetised. This has always been done to some extent, of course, and one of the key functions of Art is to create these fantasy worlds, whether it be a Greek tragedy, a romantic novel, or a Batman movie. But it can be argued that nowadays we often no longer make our own fantasies but rely on the so-called creative industry to sell us mass-produced dreams (movies, TV, pulp fiction, Disneyland, porn), turning us into mere passive recipients of cultural products. Watching a film requires less of our creative imagination than reading a Victorian novel; pornography guides, or perhaps even dictates, our sexual fantasies down to the slightest detail, whereas in the days of erotica we would need to build our own internal sexual scenario around a mere picture or photo; entire industries churn out romantic dreams of candlelit dinners and love everlasting with the perfect partner for life. We have outsourced our inner world.

Let’s face it, most of us love and cherish our fantasies – I know I do. They are a magic carpet that lifts us above the trivialities, disappointments and frustrations of daily life. The problem is that we end up at some level believing in them even if we know they aren’t true. I’m not talking here of an imagined stereotypical teenage girl screaming at a K-Pop concert; I’m talking about all of us, no matter how smart we think we are, or how cynical. At some level deep inside us, the fantasy world glitters and the Disney girls lure us like lorelei.