Let's face it: I'm not really a romanticist. I built my personality on analytical observation, rational thought and brutal honesty. That does not go well together with believing in fairytales. After all, romanticism is nothing more than suspending your disbelief in favor of a mythology that constructs a reality you'd very much prefer to the one you are living in. It's almost the antithesis of what I do. I think you can tell by the fact that most of my posts here would make a horrible dating profile.
However, that doesn't mean that I don't dream. While most dreams I have at night are usually garbled nonsense if I can even remember them, I love daydreaming. Cultivating your own fantasy can be the most addictive form of entertainment you'll ever come across in your life. The only thing that I do differently than a romanticist is that I see my dreams for what they are. It's easy to confuse the rose-tinted projections of what you wish to be the future with a rational prediction of the future. I hold the firm belief that you get the best outcome in life if your predictions of the future are accurate, so I try to base my actions on my predictions and not my dreams.
That being said, dreaming is awesome. Romanticism is awesome. There's a reason people tell each other stories at the camp fire. There's a reason people like to read novels, watch movies or play role-playing games. It's all ways to make those dreams just a little more real. And it is important to stress that "real" in this context does not mean "more like reality". It's intentionally different from reality. Reality is what you want to get away from. Instead, it means "replacing reality". For a moment you forget about the rules and constraints of the world you live in and believe in what you would like the world to be. This is perfectly fine and there is no harm in doing that, as long as you understand that this is separate from reality and that you have to go back to reality when necessary.
Some of you may know that, when I was at university, I worked at a chair about virtual reality. There, we worked on technological means of making these fictional worlds more real (in the sense described above). In the scientific community, that phenomenon is called "presence". If a machine replaces your sensory inputs with new ones generated by a computer, it becomes much easier for you to perceive the virtual world as real, although the dream is not even yours. While virtual reality systems can achieve incredible degrees of presence, one thing they cannot do is make you loose your way back to reality. At some point, the system will be turned off and you will be back, no matter if you want to or not. Unfortunately, other means of dreaming are not as safe.
When I said that I base my actions on my predictions and not my dreams, that was a simplification. It's not entirely true. Putting on a VR headset, sitting down to read a novel or wearing a costume can be actions with the main intention of dreaming. It's no harm if it's these small, inconsequential actions and the scope is limited. This also applies to a second type of actions that enable dreaming: actions you perform in the present to enhance your dreams for the future. Examples for such actions are: writing a message in a bottle, throwing a coin into a wishing well or writing a blog post about romanticism on a webcomic that almost nobody reads. While your dream of the future is not going to happen, your action turns it from impossible to very unlikely. That infinitesimal sliver of possibility creates something as addictive as a drug: hope.
The problem is that this exploitable. Other examples for an actions of the second type are: buying a lottery ticket, participating in a casting show or going to see a miracle healer. While these actions are small and inconsequential at first, they lead down a slippery slope towards actions that may not be as inconsequential anymore. That's because in these cases there are other people who know how to dangle that sliver of hope in front of you like a carrot on a stick to make you do their bidding. I'm not saying you should stay away from this second type of dream enhancing actions. Just be aware of the dangers they can pose if you loose your way back to reality.
Finally, I want to talk about what I think is by far the best way to enhance your dreams: sharing them. To show what I mean, I want to share my biggest dream with you: I dream that, at some point, I find another person that shares my love for the truth and also understands the world with analytical observations and rational thought. We would vow to never loose track of reality while being brutally honst with each other about anything real. Yet, we would also share our dreams, suspending our disbelief together to spend brief periods of time in realities that are so beautiful none of us could have conceived them on our own. We would talk about how we'd both quit our jobs to go live in a cabin in the woods, explore antarctica or even fly to mars, just to go back to work the other day with the warm feeling of having had a beautiful dream, together with a beautiful person.
