THERE are all sorts of names for us, the fantasists of this world, and some of them aren’t too flattering.

We come in varying shapes and degrees. There are the hardcore geeks who speak fluent Elvish and go to cosplay conventions.

There are the straight-laced professionals who lead the most practical of lives but take guilty pleasure in reading books that take them to places they never get to frequent during the day.

Some take it further by applying this inclination to their art of specialization, giving it a quality that is, perhaps more than figuratively, a little out of this world.

At the core, we’ve a lot in common. We all love whatever transcends the ordinary, what goes beyond the world’s perception of normality. There’s some wishful thinking involved, too.

Secretly, a lot of us wouldn’t mind discovering a little door in the bedroom wall that wasn’t there before, or find that the mythical creatures of your dreams have somehow materialized and are sitting on your front lawn. Well, providing they were the pleasant sort. (Currently, due to the influence of a particular TV show, if a mad genius appeared at my door and offered to take me across time and space in a box if I would help him save the world, I’d happily oblige.)

It might be the stuff of childhood, but sometimes I feel that we adults are in greater need of a little indulgence in these daydreams. I look around and there are all these tired faces- cynics and grey-faced skeptics who are weighed down by the world, and really, who can blame them? They may have dusted themselves off time and again, pep-talking themselves into living the principles of The Secret, positive thinking and a stack of self-help books, but when push comes to shove (except, perhaps, for a few genuinely enlightened souls), the weight of real life sets in and is never fully dissipated.

Oh, yes- we of the modern era come fully equipped with defence mechanisms galore- avoidance of issues, laying on mask after brave mask, looking for possible avenues to place the blame, lashing out at the people closest to us while remaining stoic and functional for the rest of the world. In the meantime, in the bigger picture, they pile up into rock formations in our souls, until our hair turns gray and we bear the weight of the entire universe, including the parts we haven’t even heard of.

That’s why I think learning how to dream actually helps- the process of seeing the world as neither black nor white, neither light nor dark, but animated, many-dimensional, and in colour.

Unrealism is actually enhanced realism in a sense- it’s about living in a fantasy world none other than this one. It’s my personal opinion, but I feel that the best kind of reality is a lovely blend of what we perceive with our senses, and what we see with our imagination. Our senses and our imagination, hand in hand. It makes the whole business of creation more fascinating, because surely our Creator never meant us to be mere inhabitants, but co-Creators. If we’re inclined to take a Biblical line of thought (though there are many others to go by, and each to his own), it’s there nonetheless- “created in His own image”- which should be a glaring hint. Here’s another- we were given the ability to dream, to see not just what is, but what if, an array of parallel alternatives, possibilities and impossibilities made real because we thought them up. Like I said, many-dimensional.

The miracle of simple events. The miracle of us, living our lives in a shared and continuous process of creation.

It doesn’t have to make the blood run through our veins. We don’t have to thrive on it, cancelling out what is in front of us in place of wishful thinking. There’s a line between fanciful and delirious. But every now and then, we can allow ourselves to believe, to let go of all the impossibilities that the world attached to our wings and take flight, for just a few moments.

And delight in it.