Fantasy.

Fantasy is important. It bridges the distance between what we want and what we can’t get. It is useful as a defense against the discrepancy between the world we imagine and the one that is really out there, constructed or not. It helps cope with stresses and provides sustenance fuel for moving on.

The array of individual fantasies is maybe so large. Yet, in each culture or region some fantasies tend to be recurrent that they sort of indicate collective urges, general misgivings, or cultural deficiencies.

For the ancient Egyptians, life after death where justice is administered was a fantasy-cum-religious belief, perhaps reflecting the repression necessary for state-building and civilization. In pre-Islamic Arabia, gardens and rivers were a collective fantasy telling of the arid desert environment.

For present day Arabic-speaking peoples, the most recurrent fantasy is about aristocracy and feudalism. Strangely, it is not about independence and fulfillment. I wonder why.

Since I have started meandering on fantasy which doesn’t exist in the material world–or that’s what seems to be– by virtue of its own definition and facts of matter, yet it causes relief at times and drives action at others. Is there a limit to fantasy? It doesn’t seem so as is shown by the accelerating march of human creativity and the endless reservoirs of imagination; definitely fantasy is connected to both. Freud thought that the world of emotions and instincts is tumultuous comprising the subconscious, whereas the psychologist Lacan theorized in the 50s that the subconscious is structured like language. Freud’s disciple, Carl Jung, posed that there is a collective subconscious made up of universal schemas shared among all cultures and are expressed in the universal themes of the wise old man, fair maid, the trickster, the snake, etc.

Without delving much into technicalities, I am not thoroughly aware of, for the three aforementioned authorities on psychoanalysis seem to converge on an Idea which I vaguely understand that dreams involve a communication with subconscious: tumultuous emotions for Freud and readable information for Jung and Lacan. For professionals, fantasy is not dream, yet for me as a dabbling and groping amateur they seem to be of the same fabric though fantasy seem to be a bit mediated by ego– the rational and organizing faculty of mind– and is considered by Lacan a self-defense mechanism.

Leaping into a more empirical language, one could think of collective subconscious as information coded in sequences of nuanced variations in bonded elements to deoxyrybonucleac acids—D.N.A. Hence dreams and fantasies are information passed down to us. It is passing of information, simply put. However, the thinking faculty or consciousness processes the information, modify by combining it with other information we receive from environment and even adds new bits of information using the supra-existence language of mathematics that may have even been the prime mover behind consciousness—or life-. So, Man is in rather fictionalized and Jestly terms is about localizing an endless stream of information. When we sleep or enter a state of temporary death we dream, a state which might be speculatively imagined as a dissolution in a fluid of information. Who knows maybe that’s what we experience on dying.