Fantasy to Reality

What We Know

Science, deeply rooted in observable human behavior, has confirmed for us beyond a reasonable doubt that where our mind goes, our bodies are soon to follow. For all our advances, this deeply symbiotic relationship seems to still be a mystery to most. In short, we don’t mind letting our minds wonder, to chase fantasy, because it feels more neutral than nefarious.

That is until we find ourselves the main actor in a play written by our mind.

The head/heart connection has always been strong, sometimes brutally so. Who hasn’t heard that song, smelled that smell, or visited that place? Interestingly, it's the experiences that often bring us the most shame that stick in our fantasy recipe. Even with this bitter ingredient, it feels we can’t help but go back for seconds.

If we, as people on a journey to health, want to become who God’s designed us to be, we must take the investigative microscope not just to our behavior but also to the thinking that leads to it.

Needs are processed neurologically. What we want, we figure out how to get. Unfortunately, many times we live like the family pet pawing and drooling over the KONG with the treat buried just far enough inside to drive us crazy. The Christian word for this is temptation. And here we find the key distinction between fantasy and imagination.

Fantasy vs. Imagination

Fantasy is most often used as a reality escape. Imagination, by contrast, when implemented properly helps us plan things previously unknown into existence. Psychiatrist, Curt Thompson in his book The Soul of Desire describes this distinction as a neurological lockdown in which the left and right sides of our brain are in a war of distraction and judgment.

Instead of attuning through the function of my right hemisphere to the present moment and being open to creating with God whatever may be in front of me, I find that my imagination, furiously locked as it is into the analysis and judgment of the left hemisphere, lives temporally in the anxiety of the future or the regret of the past. Or I am submerged in the ocean of infinite options the world offers to distract me from myself and my real life, all kindly presented to me by my web browser. My addictions are the result. I do not create in this life; I cope. - Curt Thompson, The Soul of Desire

To cope or to create, that is the question. When we give ourselves over to a life of fantasy, we necessarily reduce our creative ability. Most often, in that reduction, we give creative power in our lives over to those who have monetized our attention. Instead of writing the poem, we purchase it. Rather than painting the canvas, we purchase the art. We trade true intimacy, which by design calls on our highest imaginative capability, for pornography or a simple, physical exchange with the opposite sex. Here in lies the true danger, fantasy imprisons us not only internally, but also externally.

What About God?

Where does God stand on all this? Among many other things, he is an imaginative creator, not a fantasizing escaper. Spiritual thinker Richard Rhor weighs in on this topic by writing this in book Immortal Diamond:

God is clearly into freedom, imagination, and creativity. Look at nature: we end up with every conceivable shape and color of jellyfish, desert kangaroos that turn their urine back into liquid to nurse their young, and twenty-five hundred types of cicadas, some of which appear only every seventeen years. Who is this God? You could call God unfettered resurrection! Humans, by contrast, are preoccupied with stability, efficiency, and control, even if it means boredom and death.

We've got His image on us, in us. For many, it's been deactivated. It doesn't have to stay this way. How do we break the dangerous pattern of fantasy? We start a journey of discovery. We begin asking questions to drive ourselves deeper, not into imagined futures, but rather into real, concrete moments in our own lives. Moments lived, experienced, and for most of us, unprocessed. Pete Sczarreo puts it this way, "God invites us to remove the false layers we wear so that the “seeds of true self” he has planted inside of us can emerge." In order to do this, we must start asking honest questions, both to ourselves and to God.

This type of investigation is perhaps most vibrantly displayed in the questions of Gideon as he is interrupted in his struggle by an angel. He says, "Please, my lord, if the LORD is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all his wonderful deeds that our fathers recounted to us, saying, 'Did not the LORD bring us up from Egypt?' But now the LORD has forsaken us and given us into the hand of Midian." Judges 6:13 These types of heart questions make us afraid. They do not make God afraid. It's these kinds of questions he relishes because he knows when they emerge we have opened a previously locked door of the heart.

The Internal Dialogue

We all have an internal dialogue, and that dialogue has a history. Today, these are commonly referred to as triggers. Triggers, simply put, are things in our environment that call out a negative response. Often, this negative response is not proportionate to the thing itself. For instance, a person who is important to you finds something you did that was embarrassing, funny. Their laugh triggers in you a response of anger and hurt. There's a solid chance that this person has simply mimicked, unintentionally, a response that an uncaring caregiver may have given you as a child. Here's a great way to think about this. You are actually bringing all that old, stored up anger into the new situation. This, as we all know, often does not go well.

Often the people who receive this reaction will respond in one of two ways. They will either mirror your anger back to you, or they will simply fall into a stunned shut down. Both are equally disruptive to relational intimacy. Henry Cloud puts it this way in Changes That Heal

If we take responsibility for our feelings, we can use them to make our relationships better. Our anger is often a signal that someone has sinned against us. If we feel that the person who has sinned against us is responsible for our anger, we are in trouble. We will stay angry until the other person decides to make it better, and that could be a very long time.

And here we have the final key to understanding what takes a person away from healthy and free imagination and into a pattern of unhealthy and bound fantasy: being irresponsible with our feelings. The two predominant expressions of this lack of responsibility are: neglecting and negating. In the end, these are both forms of denial, but they express themselves differently. Let me explain.

Neglecting our feelings is the most universally adopted immaturity. It's just so much easier to live above the surface, to focus on what life presents to us at a practical level, to parrot and parade our cultural contracts. We find a great deal of peace in what we do not know and certainly won't acknowledge. The problem with this strategy in particular is that there is a great deal of momentum beneath the surface. The bulk and weight of our lives lives down there. There are an incredible amount of feelings words. If you’d like to learn of few of them, you can view the Feelings Wheel along with some guidance on how to interact with it here.

Negating finds its root in Newton's Law. We believe, falsely, that if we can just bring the opposite of what we are feeling into our lives, it will negate the feeling and its effects. So, when we are blue, we set out for a few drinks with friends. When we are angry, we do something that we believe will make us happy. When we are embarrassed, we move toward something we are proficient in, like choosing to spend time nursing a hobby while neglecting a marriage. This, in blunt terms, is self-soothing rather than self-caring.

That's Great. Now what?

Starting today, there are a few action steps that will help you begin to distinguish where and why fantasy is showing up in your life. If you commit to these practices over time, they will most certainly help you gain an awareness of when you are separating from the reality in front of you due to emotional immaturity.

Try This

• Begin keeping a daily journal.

This doesn't have to be a manuscript. A paragraph in the evenings will do. Write down the decisions you made that day. Include a tracking of your thought processes that led to those particular decisions. Within a week or two, you will be able to clearly define the fantasy thoughts that have been serving as silent backers for your undesired behavior.

• Study the Feelings Wheel.

Make it a daily practice to have it in front of you. While looking at it, pick three of the words that most closely define how you are feeling. Awareness of our internal, emotional motivators can help us identify emotions that we don't like. In this way, we can combat the emotional reasons that cause us to implement the coping mechanism of fantasy.

• Pick up a copy of Curt Thompson's book The Soul of Desire

Unlike many authors who write about neuroscience, Curt makes it interesting and applicable. Depending on your comfort level, it could be a good idea to invite a close friend to read it with you. This often leads to incredibly healthy conversation that helps us, it turns out, lock in new information.