Please tell me someone’s done a study on the correlation between stress and daydreams. Surely there’s some survey out there somewhere that shows that the more stressed out people get, the more elaborate and escapist their daydreams become. Someone please tell me I’m not alone in this (insert drama queen moan). Sigh.

Because I know that if my major were “Professional Daydreaming,” I’d be set for life. It’s as if my life has resorted to a kind of reverse osmosis where the less time I have to do things, the more my mind forces itself to dream things. I get easily distracted. Hey, look, a squirrel!

Thank goodness the past few weeks weren’t nearly as stressful as others have been in the past. My work load is just as heavy, and I’m working just as many hours, and I’m involved in way more than I used to be, but other stresses have been trimmed away so that now my soul has room to breathe. For once the Universe is allowing me to do the things I love—all of them. At once.

Yet every night I look forward to letting my head hit the pillow, so I can let my mind fly over the mountains of deadlines to a dream land where I rest in a hammock surrounded by friends, even friends I haven’t met yet, and laughing the afternoon away. I reassure myself that God knows what He’s doing, even when life is confusing, and that one day “the stressful times will be over” and the holidays will begin. I dream of dances and of music fit for angels, and I dream of all of the things that could be, or might be, or should have been, and I drift off to sleep knowing, for a moment at least, what heaven must be like.

Perhaps it is these moments of quiet, but bright possibility that make the rest of harsh reality just that much more bearable.