The Art Of Fantasy

You're sitting at your desk, but your mind is a thousand miles away, lost in a daydream.

If a colleague comes along and says, "Hey, wake up. Stay on the ball!" You'd probably feel embarrassed, and dismiss the daydream from your mind.

We tend to think of daydreaming as distracting from productive thought. Napoleon Hill, author of the classic book Think and Grow Rich, however, said, "Imagination is the workshop of the soul wherein are shaped all plans for individual achievement."

I agree with what Napoleon Hill said, because without daydreams the psyche shrivels. Fantasy can be an economical way of trying on alternative ways of feeling, acting, and being.

Fantasy is especially useful for revealing our unfulfilled wishes. Here are three fantasy exercises that I often recommend to my clients to help them uncover desires and beliefs that may not yet have crystallized in their mind:

1. On a typical weeknight you're watching the evening news, you hear the winning numbers for the lottery and find out they match the numbers you've played, and you've just won $10 million dollars. After recovering from the shock (and calculating what amount would be left after taxes) you decide the first thing you'll do is...

2. While hiking in the mountains you notice a cave in a wall of granite. You crawl up to the opening and look into the darkness. In the distance you hear running water and a voice calling, "Let me out. Let me out." And...

3. Design a utopian society that could conceivably exist in your future. How is that society governed? What are the social and political mores? Who works? When? For what? How and by whom are children raised and educated?

Keeping your imagination active with "fantasies" like these will enable you to conceive of possibilities others overlook.

Psychologist Carl Jung once wrote, "Without this playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever come to birth. The debt we own to the play of imagination is incalculable."

So, don't be afraid to let your imagination explore possibilities that extend beyond the boundaries of current reality.