The Power of Daydreams

The importance of an inner life.

Reader Note: Starting this month, two of my Monday posts will be for paid subscribers only. These pieces will be deeply researched, where I challenge my own priors in an effort to normalize intellectual growth, curiosity, and the necessary work of identifying our blind spots. My goal is to foster a space where we engage with complexity—not for the sake of ‘winning’ an argument, but for the sake of genuine understanding.

Next week, I’ll be examining where the conversation on race in America may have taken a wrong turn. As crude demagoguery becomes hypernormalized and young African Americans grow increasingly disconnected from the solidarity of the 20th-century Black experience, what happens to the frameworks that once shaped racial discourse? Have they evolved, or have they stalled? That’s where I’ll begin next Monday—hope you’ll join me.

Photo by mohsen ameri on Unsplash

My high school humanities classroom was the kind of environment that a history and literature dork fascinated by the transformations of the 1960s would thrive in.

A large Jim Morrison poster loomed over my seat, the front right corner due to my last name being Beckham. One day in class, our teacher showed us a documentary from 2004 that I will never forget: The Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis.

Curtis lays out two worlds: one shaped by radicalized believers, the other by cynical architects of empire. Both feared that the people they sought to save had been seduced by comfort, by decadence, by the slow, creeping rot of individual desire. And so they set out to forge something stronger—a grand purpose, a shared struggle, a nightmare vivid enough to pull people away from their drifting, lonely lives.

It worked.

Nightmares are an organizing principle for movement leaders and politicians when fear seems to be the only animating emotion. From nebulous wars against large concepts to the idea of an elusive foreign entity corroding one’s personal vision of an ideal homeland, these fear-based visions have defined the modern world.

Nightmares give clarity, mission, a reason to be.

They teach us to fear the quiet because, in stillness, there is no control. No imposed meaning. No righteous war to fight, no empire to build, no enemy to conquer. Just ourselves and the uneasy, unstructured hum of our own thoughts.

But then, what about daydreams?

Daydreams are the fuel for inspiration.

They are the cloud of untapped worlds floating above our mind space.

I was once a daydreamer. Sitting in the back of cars, staring out of a foggy window, lying in bed before I fell into deep sleep. I would daydream that I had supernatural gifts, superpowers, or that I could be transported to different times and places. Daydreams told stories, and they provided the energy to create new stories.

The older I became, the less I daydreamed. The stories of our real world became powerful dictators of our environment, fascinating fairy tales of our habitual development, and marketing tools of earthly gods, consistently presenting new commandments to a lost world.

Now, pocket-sized computers and an endless stream of content dream for us.

Mass media saturation demands we surrender our imaginations, staying tethered to the endless shifts of a feed, a trend, a fleeting social moment.

But that is not what the humanities taught me. The love of reading, uncovering the tales of time, and diagnosing the human condition was built on daydreams. The foundation required quiet moments of refuge, or the symbolism of fantasy realms acting as a North Star for deeper truths.

In a world built more and more for efficiency and technological certainty over abstract unease, we become afraid to think and afraid to daydream. A world of limits forms as we are told what to desire, what to watch, what to believe, and what is beautiful.

Now, we live in a constant nightmare instead of a developing dream.

But when we step back to experience quiet and construct our inner world, we develop empathy for the inner worlds of others—whether we believe another’s world to be limited or masterfully blueprinted. We build empathy. It’s the most personal thing we can create, and we learn to respect what others have built.

That is the beauty of the humanities—we learn to love humanity.

We learn to love daydreaming, not as a form of childish escape but as an entry into the hearts of others, the clouds of our inner world, and the beauty of the human experience.

I wonder if our dreams collided—if everyone in the world took the exact same 30 minutes to collectively daydream in a synchronous movement that connects all of our inner worlds like one global chain of spiritual connection. Our souls would touch, our inner warmth would thaw our collective shiver, and our minds would link under one flag of understanding and humanistic vulnerability.

One can dream.