When was the last time you let yourself drift away to another world of your making? As a chronic daydreamer, I drift often. It has been something I’ve done since I was a child. Something that was not looked upon fondly by the adults around me. My head was too far up in the clouds during times I was expected to be present. But in retrospect, the ability to temporarily leave this realm and imagine a world that feels better and freer is truly a gift. And according to Austen Smith of ImaginationDoulas it is our ancestral birthright, essentially an inheritance.

Black Joy sat down with Smith to talk in depth about the founding of ImaginationDoulas, why daydreaming matters, and ways folks can create their own intentional practice of daydreaming.

Why does daydreaming matter, particularly for Black people?

Because we have to. We have to, and I think that the more that we try to strive for values that just so happened to align with whiteness and with capitalism, our imagination becomes altered. In that process, our ancestors weren’t trying to belong or fit in. They were trying to be treated like humans, which is different than inclusivity, which is different than representation and visibility even. Those were the means. But I think that we are in a place to be in a more expansive conversation about what that looks like, if it’s even necessary. If what we do is best done underground and because of the chokehold that capitalism has on us, it’s almost like we can’t dream outside of the confinements of capitalism, of income, of generating income of wealth in the linear sense. And so, I think daydreaming is so important for the ways that…Toni Cade Bambara talks about this latent colonized power in Blackness and the courageousness needed to meet that tension.

And I really think daydreaming is the portal for that possibility to emerge through. At the same time, there’s also such a vastness to the Black imagination that having conversations about daydreaming really is just talking about the ways that we already survive, that we have daydreamt our survival into existence because we’re not sleeping at night like, and that’s the other part of this that I think is such a tender area is the black sleep disparity and the ways that we are not. We don’t have access to dreams at night because we’re not even getting sleep that’s deep enough to access the REM sleep cycle, and we’re not dreaming. And so then, daydreaming becomes a way to be with that reality, while also being a way to scaffold that reality and to create something else that allows for us to rest at night, to rest throughout the day, to rest as often as we need to, while also building worlds.

What does your daydreaming practice look like?

I have several but for me part of daydreaming is, I do a lot of audio journaling. I go for walks and I record my thoughts. That is the most direct way to convey a vision for myself, because I’m not trying to revise the vision. I’m just trying to explain what I’m sensing into, so that’s a really effective way for me to hear myself move through a vision and describe the dimensions of it.

And also, I have this blackness practice where I will turn my computer off for about 10 minutes and I go lay in my bed and I cover myself in blankets and I don’t think about anything and that is hard. But after a while, your brain is like “ohh 10 minutes to shut down.” And so, I actually just be with the blackness that’s inside of me and [then] I get back up. Hop back up to work and I feel rejuvenated because I don’t know where I went, but I needed to go there.

Another daydreaming practice is, I will digital collage what I think I’m seeing. I will make a digital collage of it and it’s not for public consumption. It’s me working [through], “what are the contents of this world that I’m seeing?” and “how do I materialize that in a visual way without investing all of my money into it immediately?” And so those are some of the practices, but I’ve worked to have a toolkit of different daydreaming practices because there’s so many different points of access when it comes to dreaming.

What are some ways people can begin to incorporate the ritual of daydreaming into their everyday life?

I would say daydreaming is rigorous, so anyone starting with a daydreaming practice should start with maybe 5 to 10 minutes. Mainly because to daydream is to travel and to travel you need to arrive and you need to arrive safely, and you need to also be able to return. So, starting with small chunks of time to just let the mind drift. You may find that where the mind drifts are worries or anxieties or fears, and that is information. It’s just information. And so, when we don’t catch judgment on that, what are our daydreams telling us? “These things really occupy my time.” “These things are really, really important to me.” “How do I set those things aside over time in my practice to be with the visioning?” Okay, well, you can schedule time to just listen to the worries and be like “I hear you.” “So how do you wanna deal with that?” “Okay, let’s daydream about some options here.” You can be with the fear in a constructive way. It doesn’t have to consume you.

But then outside of that. Just a few moments before bed of just like “how did my day go and how would I have liked it to go?” and then being like, “oh, you know what, if the sun was shining, first of all, if it was a little warmer.” Then you get in the habit of just going to different places. There’s no destination in daydreaming. It doesn’t have to result in anything other than you had a moment of reprieve. You had a moment of just being in a place that can hold you, and I feel like that’s enough sometimes. It’s just being like, “I’m working toward this future. I see it. I’m gonna go tap in there every once in a while. Just to remind myself that that’s where I’m headed. A life of ease. A life of opulence. A life of luxury. A life of satisfaction and love.” Let me just go there once a day so that I can survive where I don’t feel held in that, where I don’t feel fully resourced.” So, daydreaming really just helps you be with the now while also not getting stuck in the mire of what the now encompasses.

How do daydreaming and Black joy relate to each other?

I think daydreaming is within the multiverse of Black joy. Daydreaming is part of Black joy. Black joy is so vast. I would also even say that Black joy is a part of daydreaming, like it came from a dream. Someone had a vision of this existing and people, including yourself, are sustaining that vision. And so, this is what it means to daydream. They are in conversation in the sense that spaces for Black joy to exist must be dreamt. And Black joy and all that it encompasses has to hold space for the dreaming practice, as like a reverence practice. It is of the highest priority of Black folks to dream with the understanding that night dreaming is not always accessible or even comprehensible.

Sometimes it’s like, “what did I dream about? What was that? Why was there a blue elephant with three human legs?” That’s a real thing, too, the deciphering part, but daydreaming is an alternative to that [and] doesn’t make you feel like “I’m a failure because I don’t understand my dreams.” And so then it’s like “ohh, here are some other pockets in the day that I can use to create in my mind and to see visions and to bring those visions. And then I can talk to my homies and be like, yo, I thought about this the other day.” And what you often find out is other Black people are not far off from what you were thinking about, and so then it becomes like a web of dreaming, which is its own orgasmic experience with everybody seeing something similar and the affirming experience of that. And so that cultivates Black joy. That is Black joy.

Can you talk more about what you think is the root cause of creative blocks, or if you even believe in creative blocks?

I think creative blocks exist, but I think they’re good things. I think that creative blocks are almost like signals or pulses to be like, “hey, slow down.” “Hey, not yet.” “Not right now.” And because of the stronghold of capitalism, it’s like you can’t afford to have this creative block. So, you cannot actually afford to pause. You can’t afford to rest. That is information to me, and so when I’m experiencing a creative block I tend to see that as a sign to internally investigate what my own struggle is in the moment, but also to be with the fact that, sometimes an idea is just not ready. Sometimes you’re not ready and it’s not a matter of developing a skill or reading or Googling something. It’s literally that it is not the time.

And so creative blocks give me the time and space to investigate that and it’s like okay, “is this that I’m struggling with something” or is this something more like the idea has something to say. The idea says it’s not time or the spirit of this project says, “Wait.” So then, this is where divining becomes a really crucial mechanism for understanding what’s coming through and what the idea needs, what the project needs, what the spirit of that thing needs from you as the artist. I like to see myself as a channel and so creative blocks to me indicate that the channel is either not clear or it is clear and it’s just not time yet.

How did ImaginationDoulas come to be?

“Imagination doula” was a phrase that came to me several years ago, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it. So, I privately considered myself an imagination doula. And in a way, I would say that’s probably my gender identity. It told me that it wanted to expand in a vision recently and recently in the last couple of years where I’ve been working with music artists and poets to create projects. In particular, I’m working with an artist who is about to release his first solo album, and it was such a profound experience that gave equally back what I gave to it that I knew immediately it was a yes. I just didn’t know what the process of making it exists would look like. And so, the manifestation of it was a little bit more difficult than the visioning of it, but I knew that it wanted to exist.