Great Escape
How to Escape While Standing Still
The science of daydreaming is complicated. What it meant to me in childhood was not.
There’s no escaping childhood. I mean that in the literal sense — to be a child is to wake up each day with people you didn’t choose, in a place you didn’t choose, in a time you didn’t choose. Maybe you were lucky, or maybe you were very unlucky, but there is no picking up and moving to a new hometown, or a new family. If you grew up like I did, in a Northeastern suburb carved out of farms, there was nowhere to go, period, unless you could drive there. I was brought to places, or I stayed home, surrounded by an acre of grass, mowed once a week in the summer, which I remember felt as uncrossable as the ocean. I yearned for escape, by any avenue, though it was only much later that I understood why.
But if I couldn’t walk to freedom, or bike — unless I wanted to risk the oblivious drivers on Route 413 — then I could dream. At any moment of the day, if I was anywhere I didn’t want to be, if I were lonely or sad or bored or anxious, if I was breathing, I would slip away inside my mind, giving myself over to daydreams and reveries.
If I was anywhere I didn’t want to be, if I was lonely or sad or bored or anxious…
