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We need daydream believers

I blew by Lance Armstrong on the steepest mountain stage of the Tour de France less than a minute after pedaling my Raleigh 21-speed road bike past the thrift bakery on Route 201 in Fairfield.

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Crazy? Absurd?

Why, not at all.

This is routine daydreaming -- mobile style.

Or, at least, it used to be routine.

Alas, I fear that daydreaming has become a dying art, a victim of a digital age where electronic gadgets have replaced imaginative sojourns and ultra-organized childhoods have sapped the creative juices from boys and girls across the country.

I think this every time my high school English students struggle at brainstorming ideas for essays. Some don't know how to start. Many fail to generate even a page of notes.

Few understand that brainstorming is a first cousin of daydreaming, a practice that calls for playing games with facts, opinions and concepts. The idea is to twist and turn them every which way so that eventually patterns and relationships are revealed that become the seeds of something significant to say.

But the truth is a person cannot become an effective brainstormer if he has never daydreamed. The daydreaming comes first. And it used to be given that this took place. Or so it was when I was a kid.

I used to pour a tall glass of milk and load a plate full of soft molasses cookies to fuel my flights of fancy. I'd take these comfort foods into the living room where I would board the most comfy recliner available. Sometimes I would daydream for an hour or more without moving from the chair.

And I'd enjoy every second of my reverie.

It makes sense that I would have fun. Who wouldn't want to be the creator of his own personal universe? Who wouldn't want to go off on any adventure he wished and journey to whatever foreign port he saw as intriguing?

That's the wonder of daydreaming. There virtually are no limits to what the daydreamer can do. What's more, no batteries or chargers are needed -- ever. This means a daydreamer can function as his own entertainment center wherever he might travel -- the ultimate in self-sufficient fun.

But children today don't see a need for daydreaming. They have iPods and laptops to take them wherever they wish to go. They have cell phones that connect them almost instantaneously to whomever they wish to talk and social networks that connect them to dozens of people or more at any moment.

In the process, though, they have disconnected with their imagination; they have forgotten or never learned to explore the universe inside their head.

And so, sadly, they may never experience the joy of blowing by Lance Armstrong at the Tour de France.

Colin Hickey is an English teacher in Regional School Unit 18. His e-mail address is differentwrinkle@yahoo.com.