Everyday, each one of us entertains in the caverns of our minds
a host of secretly very enjoyable, but deeply taboo ideas and scenarios.
We fantasize about the downfall of rivals, sudden wealth and fame,
being able to reverse and accelerate time, eliminating colleagues,
anticipating the stock market, thinking of the death of various people, even a few we're meant to love,
and of course, of having sex with a huge variety of entirely inappropriate people
in a plethora of highly forbidden or just pretty non-standard ways.
The presence of these fantasies can be hugely dismaying and shame inducing.
We contain in our minds enough explosive material to set our world aflame many times over.
But in truth, having fantasies that are sharpely at odds with reality
is a fundamental feature of good human lives.
It started when we were very young, as a child we might've enjoyed imagining going to the South Pole,
wresting and then making friends with a polar bear, adopting a pet penguin with a broken wing,
and then spending the night in an igloo before getting rescued by pirates,
cruising past in a four-masted nuclear powered ship.
In the real world this would be, by turns, horrific, impossible, dangerous, and in breach of maritime law.
But in our heads, it's lovely.
Make-believe is so enjoyable because it takes a scalple to experience
and cuts away everything that would be genuinly awful in reality.
We don't worry about children fantasizing; we're confident about the many secure and obvious barriers
between having a thought and doing something about it in the world.
We should extend the same understanding to ourselves, as adults.
A fantasy isn't a plan, it's a disguised, but very precise acknowledgement
of what would never work, but needs to be aired.
In it's form, it's testement to our acceptance of the way things actually are.
We fantasize, instead of preparing.
This is what distinguishes us from genuinely terrifying people.
Those who, rather than fantasize, put things into action.
The origin of fantasy is not a failure to understand reality, it is rather a deep appreciation of reality,
which, for the sake of inner relief, has been briefly suspended.
The legal system, which makes such a strong distinction between a thought and an action,
a fantasy, and an enactment, is the guardian of a very important truth and basic liberty,
which has taken many hundreds of years for humanity to secure and must never again be blurred.
Civilized societies don't have thought crimes.
Yet, should it still worry us that fantasies occur to us at all?
Isn't it terrible that some pretty shocking thoughts do pop up into our minds,
even if we know they are just thoughts?
A fantasy is always trying to tell us something important about ourselves,
even though the message usually arrives in garbled forms.
A fantasy about wealth isn't really a political thesis about the allure of drastic inequality,
it's a way we talk to ourselves about stress and anxiety
We're imagining a life in which we didn't have to worry
Our complex sexual fantasies are ways of acknowledging certain needs
we know we had to sacrifice in the name of loyalty to people we love,
but which we need to hang on to nevertheless.
At the root of our guilt around our fantasies is that we don't know anything like enough
about the inner lives of other people.
We don't realize how deeply normal our so called, "oddest thoughts", actually are.
You can be certain that the most apparently private thoughts your harboring in utter shame
are active fantasies in the minds of millions of others, right now.
Our fantasies aren't signs of evil, they are natural products of the brain,
the result of the powerful fact that our minds need to imagine the impossible
to come to terms with the forbidding, sober nature of reality.
Thinking that our fantasies are pretty weird isn't evidence they actually are,
it's a sign we don't yet know other people well enough.