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in time and taking it to be an end state. The more powerful unconscious aspect is the role of fantasy intruding upon conscious, intentional thought. Our minds are very skillful at weaving elaborate fantasies out of the barest of mental threads. |
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What is the single most powerful and unappreciated fact of mental life? No contest: It is the considerable amount of time spent totally lost in waking fantasy. And most often, not even knowing it! |
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By fantasy, I mean a daydream, a fictional story made up of fleeting pictures along with a story line and associated feelings that we may take to be temporarily or enduringly real. Or fleeting images that we can barely even notice as we close our eyes for a moment. The reason we are unaware of much of the fantasy in our waking life is because it pops up quickly and we are not trained to be conscious enough to catch the images as they float by. |
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We tend to create fantasies to accompany many of the actual events of our lives. One small thought, one slight incidentthat's all it takes for us to spin off into fantasyland. And these daydreams can be very intenseboth in the clarity of their images and strength of feelingsand seem very real. They may be quick fantasies that last a few seconds to more complicated ones that last for minutes. In some ways, they are much like dreams we have while sleeping. The main difference would be that dreams while asleep do not have the partly conscious aspect that makes up daydreams. |
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Much of how we interpret the world in general, and scare ourselves in particular, is based on inner fantasynot the actual events of our lives. From the wonderfully positive, hopeful, and uplifting to the dismal, catastrophic, and pervertedall concoctions of our own active imagination. |
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The outcome of a fantasy may be viewed as a real and final state. We forget that we have created this inner story. And we don't realize that we have made something concrete that is a actually a process. |
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These fantasies may be especially painful and frustrating when we focus on our investments because our artificially constructed and irrevocable end states do not acknowledge the obvious dynamic, fluid nature of the market. |
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So, the process of the stock price going down is immediately viewed as a final end state. We think it will fall and stay down rather than go down temporarily and climb back up again. |
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