Daydream: The Stories We Tell Before Anyone Is Listening

My mother used to tell me about Sheikh Chilli.

The stories always ended the same way. He would imagine something, get completely carried away, and then reality would arrive and flatten everything he’d built in his head. The milk pail knocked over. The plan collapsed. The dream interrupted by the mess it made.

The lesson was clear. Stop imagining. Start doing.

I heard some version of this throughout childhood. Daydreamers were people who confused thinking with acting. Who built elaborate futures in their heads while the actual present sat waiting, unattended. It wasn’t a compliment to be called one.

And I was absolutely one.

It happened in the in-between spaces. Car rides. Bus rides. Folding clothes. Showering. The moments where your hands know what they’re doing and your mind quietly slips the leash. That’s when a scene would arrive. A situation, a line of dialogue, a character in a specific moment. And I wouldn’t let it go. I’d pull on it, see what was attached, follow it somewhere. Not deliberately, the way you sit down to write. More like accompanying something that was already moving.

Some of these stayed for weeks. Some for years. Returning each time slightly sharper, slightly more complete. Vivid enough that I could watch them unfold while simultaneously being present in the real world, which is a strange thing to admit and also completely true.

None of it felt like wasted time. But I had no language for what it actually was.

Then the Law of Attraction arrived, telling me that imagining things was not just acceptable but essential. That the direction you hold in your mind shapes what you eventually move toward. If you can dream it, you can do it.

There was just one problem.

My dreams had nothing to do with me.

Not in the way the Law of Attraction intended. There was no vision of my ideal life, no future version of myself standing in a better apartment. Instead there was a girl secretly in love with her neighbour, glancing across the corridor and saying nothing. Three women who cross paths entirely by accident and end up building something together. A man sitting in an airport lounge, watching the door, and then his ex walks through it.

None of them were me. All of them were completely real to me.

I couldn’t figure out if this meant the Law of Attraction wasn’t working, or if I was doing it wrong, or if my subconscious had simply decided it was more interested in other people’s problems than my own. Possibly all three.

What I didn’t have yet was a way to think about what these daydreams actually were.

That came through my friend Nidhi, who wrote Story Visioning. Everyone tells you that you can manifest anything. Very few tell you how. Even fewer give you step by step instructions. Nidhi does just that. She takes the story in your head seriously as a tool, not a distraction or a detour, and hands it back to you as something you can actually use.

Which made me look at my own daydreams differently.

A story that begins in a daydream has no audience. No one to perform for, no expectation to meet, no need to make it land. You’re not shaping it for anyone. You’re just letting it exist. And because of that, it stays honest in a way that later versions rarely do. The editing comes after. The audience comes after. The need to make it make sense to someone else comes after.

Before all of that, there is just the scene. The character. The moment that won’t leave you alone.

I don’t daydream the way I used to. Most of the in-between spaces now have audiobooks in them. Chores, commutes, the quiet moments that used to belong to whatever my mind wanted to build. Someone else’s stories live there now. I don’t entirely know how I feel about that.

The girl and her neighbour, the three women, the man in the airport lounge. They’re in documents somewhere, waiting. Filed away for the book I will write eventually.

Maybe Shaikh Chilli’s problem wasn’t the dreaming.

Maybe it was that nobody told him the dream was the first draft.

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This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026 .

This is a series about storytelling beyond a craft. As something we live inside. In memory, in conversation, and in the way we understand what happens to us. Read all posts here.

I’ve done A2ZChallenge in 2017, where I collected 26 quotes by people whose names started with the letter of the day. In 2015, the theme was professional life.