Understanding fantasies. Do fantasies pacify loneliness or do fantasies make loneliness worse? Is there a difference between fantasies in a healthy relationship and fantasies when you are not in a healthy relationship? Are fantasies a natural function of the brain that automatically occur? The brain is a processor that must remain active, so fantasies may simply be a routine process of an active brain.
Creating unrealistic or improbable mental images may be one aspect of fantasies but inventions are the products of fantasies. Fantasies do not seem to be random as there seems to be a specific focus and course that the fantasy takes. For instance, a solid romance or a planet without turmoil and pollution are fantasies that are not unrealistic or improbable.
Just as understanding dreams gives a person an insight into themselves, understanding what you delight in fantasizing about also gives you a better understanding of yourself. That is just an opinion so do not lay it on your pillow and sleep with it. Fantasizing can be a way to briefly take you out of yourself and your everyday concerns, but it can also be a distraction keeping you from doing the things that you need to do.
Fantasies may address a psychological need, but it does not satisfy it because whatever the lacking is remains there. Someone is standing on a mountain top and scanning the horizon. As far as that someone can see there is a pristine forest. The sky is blue and empty of clouds. The temperature is moderate and there is a slight breeze. Surrounded by such peace and beauty, does someone need to fantasize?
Someone is sitting alone in a room. The clock has moved into another day. Sleep is as far away from this someone as the early morning hours of yesterday. Every tick of the clock on the wall sounds like an explosion into eternity. If given the chance this someone will recap all their past mistakes until a feeling of depression sets in. Can this someone afford the luxury of fantasizing under the circumstances?
Fantasizing may be harmless when you are not fantasizing about a specific person if you keep the fantasy abstract and impersonal. If this is your fantasizing technique it is unlikely to cause anyone else harm. The detail of a fantasy is like a breath of air that comes and goes while the essence of the fantasy may remain intact. It is like putting different actors in the same play using the same script. The camera is rolling, and the sound equipment properly adjusted for the next scene in the fantasy that will take place.
Understanding fantasies is a part of understanding your inner self and how you interact with this illusion called life and the certainty of your death. A frog is reminiscing near a pond about the things that its great grand frog told it. Of how clean the water used to be even when it was muddy. Of how there was an abundance of creatures that bathe and drink from it. Of how the rainwater that fell into it used to be nourishing. Of how the Indigenous people laughed and sang as they camped by the ponds bank. And now it has come to this.
Fantasizing may be a temporary way of escaping reality and a fantasy may become a reality. As with everything there is a good side and there is a bad side to fantasizing. The deeper one gets into trying to understand the nature of fantasies the better one becomes in developing an undisruptive and nontoxic way of daydreaming.