When you’re fourteen, you want attention, a future, you look forward to a realistic what-if. When you’re twenty-four, you just want to have a little fun, an escape from the serious things that keep you up at night. At twenty-four, I fantasize precisely because and when these fantasies have no potential of fullfilling themselves in reality. Because their purpose for me is entirely unrealted to what I want and need in my waking external life.
Fantasy has always been a response to the crisis of reality. Just look at Western literature. Tales ranging from Chronicles of Narnia to Lord of the Rings erupted from attempts to safely analyze humanity without pushback or to remove one’s mind from it altogether for at least a little while.
Or take mythology— be it Greek, Roman, or of the ancient Indian subcontinent —stories of gods and demons give us a way to make sense of a world in which science still didn’t have a name. A world in which gravity and oxygen and cells existed but no one know how they worked or why they were there.
More than anything, fantasy is a safe space to act out on evil impulses without endangering people in real life.
We all have our avenues for escapism. We need them. If we spent our entire lives stuck with only what’s in front of us, we’d lose our minds. Because our brains are bigger than the world.
To be honest though, I can’t say ten years have made much of a difference in my subconscious preferences. I just have a thing for that salt and pepper look, you know? Case in point: Japagathi is still my favorite actor and still the sexiest man that’s ever lived, and I think my problem is that this other man is the second sexiest. The difference between fantasizing about Raj, a man who looks like Jagapathi, and (well, I call him) Sundara, a man who looks like an older man I’ve actually met is that one doesn’t know I exist and one does.
Actually, that’s a lie, Jagapathi does kinda know I exist.
But that’s about as far as our relationship goes.
Note that I say “a man who looks like” in both instances. Because however much based on reality fantasies might be, at the end of the day, the version of a person we store in our fantasies is very much not that person. I’ve filled in a million missing blanks wondering: what’s his favorite drink? Where does he spend his Friday evenings? His Monday mornings? Does he every cry? When and why? And a million other things.
90% of the time, those fantasies aren’t even romantic or sexual. I vent to him about problems I can’t vent to anyone else about, other than myself. Talking to myself gets lonely. Talking to an imaginary version of another person that I’ve manipulated to my own needs is therapeutic. Effectively, he’s only another part of my own subconscious.
Some people meditate on god, don’t they?
