When I was still in high school, I often daydreamed myself getting my Ph.D.
I knew that I wanted to pursue a doctoral degree—yes, even in high school. Although at the time I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant or entailed, and did not fully grasp what a dissertation was, I would listen to music and close my eyes and pretend:
I imagined myself, in one of those elaborate caps and gowns with the hood, standing in a line of my fellow graduates. I imagined my parents beaming from somewhere in the audience. I imagined receiving the degree, hearing the word “Doctor” pronounced before my name.
No one ever taught me to daydream in this way; I’ve just always done it. I daydreamed what my wedding would be like before I had dated a single boy. I daydreamed what living in an apartment and going to college might be like. Later, I daydreamed getting my first job, owning a home, going to a new church, becoming a writer.
This has never been an intentional practice or one with any purpose in mind: I don’t do “manifesting” or New Age visualizing. This is just a habit I’ve always had—sometimes for good and ill, as I am also exceedingly talented at envisioning plane crashes, getting fired, and humiliating myself in front of others.
On the one hand, my daydreaming is never fully accurate. Graduating with my Ph.D. was infinitely more boring and sweatier than I had dreamed it might be—but I did have the moment I had envisioned walking down the aisle in my regalia and seeing my beaming parents and husband in the stands. I hadn’t daydreamed my husband’s face, but when I married him our wedding was as full of love and joy and community as I had hoped it would be.
It took me a while before I realized these daydreams served as a sort of “rehearsing” for me: my mind’s way—God’s way—of preparing me for what was to come. Daydreaming something meant that it became real to me, in a way: a possibility, instead of something I couldn’t even let myself think about. And daydreaming about those possibilities helped me to become ready for them.
Most of us do some version of this, from the small to the large. Who among us practicing for a presentation hasn’t tried to imagine what it would be like to give it well, to a watching audience? Who, having left an unfortunate encounter with someone who had the last word, didn’t reimagine it in a way that allowed us to speak our minds as eloquently as we wish we had?
It wasn’t until I read Mark Thibodeaux’s use of the term “praydreaming,” though, that it occurred to me this rehearsing might have a spiritual use.
In his book Reimagining the Ignatian Examen, Thibodeaux, a Jesuit priest, offers readers a variety of ways to pray the traditional Jesuit examen. I have benefited spiritually from this prayer, and was delighted by Thibodeaux’s approach: the book offers a slew of varieties on the traditional prayer that serve as a neat jumping-off point for spiritual reflection.
In one of these approaches, Naming the Grace, Thibodeaux recommends thinking to a particularly challenging part of your day. Examining that moment, he invites readers first to repent as needed, then to ask God to reveal the grace (virtue or fruit) that we might require in order to respond in a more appropriate or godly way. This is where Thibodeaux encourages “praydreaming,” where we imagine how, with that grace, we might be able to respond differently or better.
And my first immediate thought was this: why have I never done this before?
I rehearse my frustrations all the time. When someone hurts me, I often relive the slight, reimagining it so that I can make my hurt clear or that the wrongdoer apologizes. When someone is hateful, I dwell on what might make them see the error of their ways. But for all my daydreaming, it never occurred to me to daydream myself into a holier response.
And of course it wouldn’t. Satan has no interest in that, and I have a distractable mind.
But surely, if I can envision my future graduation and my wedding and my future job and my career as a writer, I can rehearse holiness. Instead of dwelling on wrongs done to me or how something might be made right, I can change my imagining to focus on how I might become more holy. How a more God-focused version of me might respond.
Again, that doesn’t guarantee anything. We’re not, as I said, doing anything like “manifestation” practice. But I do believe that we are what we think, and God warns us that our thoughts and our heart dictate how we behave. If that’s the case, why not regale our own imaginations with grace?
Because it’s difficult, that way. We can daydream promotions. It’s harder to daydream humility and satisfaction with what we’ve got. We can daydream a comeuppance; it’s harder to daydream peace and surrender, turning the other cheek. We can daydream seizing the moment and doing the thing, whatever it is; few of us would want to daydream the days-keep-going-by practice of patience.
And yet what we think, we often do, often become.
I love this idea of “praydreaming,” of allowing God to inform my imagination and my thoughts when I spend time with him. Of daring to let God shape the focus of my mental wanderings so that, in time, my heart starts to turn more to things of Him and less to things of my own. One of my hopes this year was to bring God into my life more on a daily basis, to have Him suffuse my life, and this seems like a good way to do it—to invite Him into my wide-ranging thoughts, and to allow him to transform them.
The reality might not resemble the daydream, but if it brings me closer to God, that’s benefit enough.
Samaritan's Song 