Why I Even Bothered Looking Into That Whole “Dreamer” Thing
Man, I gotta tell you, for the longest time, I completely blew off that whole astrology thing. You know how it is. It’s just some silly meme on the internet, right? But then things got seriously messy in my own life, and I started seeing connections everywhere. The title of this post—it’s not about making fun of Pisces; it’s about figuring out why some people (myself included, maybe) can just check out when things get rough. That’s the core practice I decided to dig into last month: understanding escapism, not judging it.
It all started when I was trying to finish this one big project. It was one of those tasks that just needed brute force, head-down, nine-to-five grinding. But every time I sat down, my mind would just take off. I’d start planning a theoretical trip to the Himalayas, or designing a tiny home I’ll never build, or just straight-up re-writing old conversations in my head, feeling those feelings again. That’s when my partner, who is super into all that star stuff, just casually threw it out there: “Dude, you’re acting like a textbook Pisces with that avoidance tactic.”
The Scramble for Answers: My Messy Practice
I rejected it, naturally. But it stuck with me. So, I figured, okay, if I’m going to procrastinate anyway, I might as well procrastinate productively. I kicked off the whole investigation by just typing the most basic crap into the search bar: “Why do people daydream so much?” and “Is dreaming bad?” What I found was a confusing load of mush, from actual clinical psychology papers I couldn’t understand, to these fluffy spiritual blogs that just said, “It’s your superpower!” That didn’t help me finish my project.
So, I switched tactics. Instead of reading about it, I tried to track it. I bought this cheap, ugly little notebook and literally wrote down every time I caught myself checked out. I was logging like seven or eight major daydream sessions a day.
- Day 1: Logged 15 minutes planning a fictional short film plot right before a 2 PM meeting.
- Day 4: Spent 45 minutes redesigning my entire apartment layout while I was supposed to be writing code.
- Day 7: Realized I was just staring at the wall, mentally arguing with a landlord I had two years ago.
The logs just confirmed it: I was a master of mental absence. The deeper I dug into the “Pisces as a person” idea—that deeply feeling, artistically sensitive, but constantly running away energy—the more I saw myself. It wasn’t about being born in March; it was about having a mechanism to cope with too much static.
The Real Reason I Finally Got It
Now, here’s the part that actually brought this whole messy experiment home and made me understand it wasn’t just a simple character flaw. It’s the personal experience that gave me the key, just like when you only understand code when something breaks in production.
About six months ago, I was working at this startup. The kind where everyone talks about “family” and “hustle,” but it’s really just a poorly managed disaster. We had a massive failure—we lost a huge contract, and the CEO, instead of owning it, decided to throw a “Positive Vibes Only” mandatory meeting. Seriously. He stood up there and talked about “manifesting success” while half the team knew they were about to get laid off.
I tried to sit there and be present, to nod and pretend I was absorbing this corporate nonsense, but I literally couldn’t. I felt this huge, overwhelming wave of anger and absurdity wash over me. It was too much to process responsibly in that moment, under that pressure.
So, what did I do? I closed my eyes for a split second, right there in the meeting, and I was gone. I wasn’t just thinking; I mentally constructed a detailed scenario where I was sitting on a remote beach, listening to the waves, completely unreachable by email or mandatory positive affirmations. I physically escaped the room in my head. I didn’t open my eyes again until the meeting was over, and I realized I hadn’t heard a single word of the final five minutes.
The Simple Realization and My New Practice
That moment—that forced, immediate, total mental check-out—was the “Aha!” moment. These “dreamers” aren’t just lazy. They’re running a sophisticated, instantaneous software patch to handle information overload. When the emotional or complex reality becomes too heavy, too stupid, or too painful to engage with safely, they automatically hit the ‘Eject’ button. That’s the creative/escapist nature. It’s a defense mechanism before it’s an artistic hobby.
So now, my practice isn’t about stopping the dreaming; it’s about channeling it right.
- Instead of letting my mind argue with the old landlord (the “escapism from feeling”), I redirect the energy into my fictional short film plot (the “creative outlet”).
- When a work task is too complex, I schedule a formal, 15-minute “dreaming break” instead of trying to fight the urge while staring at the screen.
It turned out to be less about “Is Pisces dreaming?” and more about, “What are they running away from, and can that escape route be used to build something instead of just hide?” I finished that big project, by the way, thanks to those forced dreaming breaks. Maybe the real escape was realizing I didn’t have to fight my own brain so hard. That’s the record of my dive. It wasn’t clean; it was messy, emotional, and very real. But I got somewhere.
