Alice lies stretched along the warm edge of the pool, her body relaxed, her chin resting on the tiles. The water below her is impossibly blue, and it is filled—quite absurdly—with tennis balls. They drift and bob, some half-submerged, some catching the light just enough to glow. It is the sort of scene that asks a simple question and refuses to answer it: is this real, or is it imagined? Is Alice dreaming, or have her private thoughts quietly spilled into the world?
I was the child who stared out the window. While others filled pages with notes, I filled the margins with shapes, patterns, and half-formed ideas. Teachers mistook my stillness for absence, my quiet for disengagement. I was often told to pay attention, as if attention were a single, fixed state rather than something elastic, capable of stretching elsewhere. I assumed everyone drifted like this, slipping between what was said and what was seen.
One afternoon in sixth-form biology stands out. It was spring, unseasonably warm, the kind of heat that makes classrooms heavy and slow. Sunlight poured through the windows, gently roasting those unlucky enough to sit nearby. The teacher’s voice hummed on, steady and forgettable. According to my exam results, I absorbed roughly half of what was required. Biology never quite caught me. But that day, looking past the glass, I noticed something I had never really seen before.
The market garden next door had just been ploughed. Dark, raw earth lay exposed, waiting. Amid the familiar greens and browns, a single tree stood in full blossom. It was startling. A sudden, unapologetic burst of colour where none was expected. That moment stayed with me far longer than anything written on the blackboard. It was a small revelation, delivered quietly, without effort.
Daydreaming does that. It loosens the grip of the immediate and allows the mind to wander into unexpected territory. It is not about switching off, but about tuning into something else. Daydreams can be grand or utterly ordinary, but they share one thing: they belong entirely to the dreamer. They are private spaces where thoughts rearrange themselves without permission or consequence.
Despite this, daydreaming carries a faint stigma. We label it “zoning out,” “off with the fairies,” as if it were a flaw rather than a function. Yet when the mind roams, it forges new connections, tests ideas safely, rehearses futures that may never arrive. It can be restorative, even necessary.
Alice understands this instinctively. I have watched her fall asleep, her breathing slow, her paws twitch as if running through some imagined field. Dogs dream, we are told. Perhaps her dreams are full of tennis balls—endless, floating, just out of reach. Or perhaps they are quieter than that.
Does she count them as she drifts off? Or is she, like the rest of us, simply letting her mind wander, unbothered by whether it looks like paying attention at all?
Daydreaming, Oil on Linen 95 cm x 180 cm
