And Invitation to Suspend Reality: What Would You Do if You Won 6 Months of Time on a Scratch Card?

What would you do if you won 6 months of time on a scratch card?

Yesterday, I asked someone that very question. Their answer was ‘I don’t know; never really thought about it.’

Both in my work and my personal life, I find myself often asking questions to which I get the kind of answer. Often verbatim.

Sometimes, I nudge with a ‘Well, now I’ve asked and the possibility entered your awareness, what would you do?’

I’d like to report that people a keen to accept the invitation, suspend reality for a little while and dream a little, but the truth is that the resistance is strong. More often than not, first encounters with such invitations end with, ‘I don’t have a clue, it’s just unrealistic.’

‘What’s unrealistic?’

‘That it could happen.’

‘And you don’t feel like dreaming a little?’

‘It would be nice, but I don’t think I can.’

‘How do you feel about not being able to dream for a little while?’

The last one is usually met with a shrug of shoulders and verbalised as ‘Meh’ with a tonal hue of resignation.

That last part is which I lament the most; the fact that the systems and the resulting world we collectively created not only robbed us of our ability to dream but even of our ability or energy to feel incensed about it being robbed from us. And which, for I’m an imperfect human, I struggle to accept.

The fact that we’ve been robbed of even the desire to immerse in some daydreaming makes me rage like few other things do. I feel overcome with righteous anger and sense of injustice being done to me and to so many around me. There’s also a good deal of grief mixed in.

A sense of loss.

Because it did not have to be this way.

It DOES not have to be this way.

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The more positive thing I observed, though, is that the people I ask and nudge sometimes bring that up themselves when they see me on the next occasion. They don’t yet dream outrageously, shamelessly, unrealistically, but it becomes apparent that those questions stirred something. Freed something, however small. Freed it enough for it to begin working its magic.

Freed it enough for the entrenched layers of the world’s pressures to slightly crack.

Freed it enough for us to re-experience a fraction of what it used to feel like when we were kids and dreamt not only with our minds but with our whole bodies.

Immersed in the dream.

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‘What’s the point?’ some people ask.

The experience is the point. The experience one enters when they close their eyes and gives themselves permission to fly.

If we do daydreaming right, it can take us a high as skydiving does. Interestingly, a lot fewer people would ask, ‘Why skydive?’ Most understand that it’s all about the experience, even if that particular way of experiencing the high isn’t for them.

‘I’d rather not daydream; I’ll only have to come back to reality, so I’d rather not fool myself’ some say.

That’s a fair observation and an understandable self-protection strategy. And it often arises from too many crash landings. Somewhere along the way we make either a conscious or semi-conscious decision that it’s safer not to let ourselves fly because the crashlanding hurts badly.

But is it ‘better to have loved and lost or never to have loved at all?’ (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)

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Maybe we can just learn to land gently instead of renouncing dreaming?

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What would you do if you won 6 months of time on a scratch card?