Dolly Daydream Was Right

Sally Slapdash. Dolly Day Dream.

I can still hear them.

Not shouted. Never shouted. Almost said fondly, the way adults used to say things they didn't realise would lodge in a child forever.

Sally Slapdash, because I rushed everything I didn't care about and got it wrong.

Dolly Day Dream, because half of me was never there, especially in class.

I still carry these labels. I used to read them as failures. Only recently have I started reading them as data.

What the labels actually were

Slapdash wasn't carelessness. It was a brain that couldn't sustain effort on things it had already decided didn't matter, and could sustain ferocious, tunnel-vision effort on the things that did. As an adult I call that hyperfocus. It's the reason I can build a six-module programme in a weekend and can't remember birthdays.

Dolly Day Dream took me longer to reframe. "Not paying attention" carries a specifically damning weight. It was said like a warning, like I would miss something vital, and I still feel that fear now. It implied a childlike escape, someone too fragile to stay in the real world.

I don't think that any more. I think it's one of the most useful things about me, and it always has been. I have always dreamt big. Not as an escape from a hard life, just how my brain runs, and it's also very enjoyable.

Dreaming, manifesting, hope. They're skills, not indulgences.

Real manifestation has two parts working together. Visualisation, and aligned action. You build the picture clearly enough that it becomes a real target, and then you act toward it, in small ways, on the days you don't feel like it and the days nothing seems to be working. Take away the action and it's just daydreaming. Take away the picture and you've got nothing to act toward in the first place.

There's a psychologist called Charles Snyder who defined hope not as a nice feeling, but as something with three working parts: a goal, a believable path to it, and a belief that you're capable of walking that path. Take the goal away and hope has nothing to stand on. You can't hope your way anywhere if you've never let yourself picture where you're actually going.

Most of us have almost no space left for this. The wandering, undirected thinking that used to happen on a train, in a queue, doing the washing up, has been filled in by a phone. Every idle minute gets handed over before your mind's had the chance to go anywhere on its own. That idle wandering isn't wasted time. It's where the picture gets built. You can't set a target for your own attention if you never give it the quiet to form one.

The mechanism underneath the visualising

There's a small structure at the base of your brainstem called the reticular activating system. Its job is to decide what gets through to your conscious attention out of the enormous amount of information your brain takes in. It filters based on what you've told it matters. That's why the week you decide to buy a red car, you suddenly see red cars everywhere. The cars didn't change. The filter did.

Picture a goal vividly and often enough, and you're giving that filter a new target. You start noticing the opportunity, the conversation, the small opening you'd have filtered out as irrelevant six months ago. That's the visualising doing its job. But noticing an opening isn't the same as walking through it. That's what only the action can do.

So here's something to try

Dream something. Take a scenario, maybe a better relationship with your child. This can be hard if you are in particularly challenging circumstances, in which case start specific and small. 

What does it actually look like? What does an ordinary Tuesday feel like inside it? What are you saying to each other, and what's the tone? What are you not doing any more that you do now out of fear? What is the version of you living this actually doing differently, day to day? Where has this version of you shown up in your life before? She will not be new.

Then pick one small step. One piece of aligned action this week that version of you would take. Not the whole plan, just the one thing.

Dream and take the step.