The Perilous Day-dreaming Syndrome

A very dangerous habit, this day-dreaming syndrome, as I came to realize through the horrible experience of an unfortunate friend. Well, I used to day-dream too, and still do, but I exercise it with a bit of caution – now that I know how it can come back to bite your bottom later.

So, this is what happened. My friend is an artist of sorts. He keeps drawing people’s caricatures in an attempt to improve his artistic skills. I think he knows that he is hardly any good at it, but I give him a lot of credit for trying and trying and trying again. When he started his college year, he quickly made friends around because of his open nature, yet brooding nature. But a month hence, people started withdrawing from him, keeping their distance, even avoiding him at some stage. This, a couple of people found very strange because among the people avoiding him, were mostly women. When asked, a couple of them accused him of being a pervert because he kept staring at their breasts sometimes. Many people just shook their heads and muttered intelligibly. The matter almost reached the ears of the Director of the Institute. Things continued going downhill for him until one guy decided to check things out for himself. So he started observing this fellow minutely till he discovered that my friend had absolutely no fascination for breasts and that he as staring into space, thinking out his caricatures. It happened more than once that he was pulled out of his own world by this amateur detective while seemingly staring at nobody in particular. It was only then that people started realizing that he was merely going off into his artistic world and not fantasizing about every woman in the college.

One can imagine how such an apparently harmless thing as day-dreaming can lead to such serious consequences, especially for someone who is not even aware of what is happening around him/her. But, there is also another thing to take out of this story – How we judge people immediately and brutally upon the comments or observations of others. How we are so easily mislead by our own brains or others because we are too lazy to find things out for ourselves. It is almost horrendous to think of the number of times we have judged others based on others’ opinions. Given a moment of reflection, I’m sure a lot of people will recollect at least one incident where they judged a person before even talking to them.

I believe in this matter, we are rather like a flock of sheep. The one who is at the head will turn in a particular direction and the rest will blindly follow the bleater in front. There is hardly any sense of wait – take a breath – talk – find out for yourself. All we want is everything to be fast but how about taking a moment to review those decisions. To really see and not just glance at what passes for unimportant, because that review will mean the difference between a good friend and a scorned pervert.

Moral of the Story: Day-dreaming makes you a pervert.