My most enduring memory about daydreaming was when our Grade One teacher Mrs Mpala, gave my friend Collen a thunderous clap.

The echo reverberated through the corridors at Masuku Primary in Tshabalala. Wherever he was, Collen was excruciatingly yanked from repose to hard reality. The rest of us were obviously shocked and terrified.

The effect of that belligerent act was intentional, to show all of us that the ma’am meant business. And that life at that primary school was not going to be a walk in the park.

At once we knew who was boss and that the consequences of crossing her path would be painfully dire.

But what my unfortunate friend paid for was to drift from reality to a fantasyland we were obviously not privy too. He was not paying attention to what was happening in class and was caught out. But was what he was doing wrong?

Daydreaming seems to have been looked down upon merely because it took the daydreamer away from the present.

Teachers demanded all our attention because this supposedly guaranteed that we absorbed what was being taught. It was more of indoctrination than anything else if you ask me.

I was easily bored by those lessons because I had already been exposed to all that at home. Our late father plied us piles of reading material he got from his white friends and the auction.

I have mentioned here before that when I was in Grade Two I was already fighting for the newspaper with my father. While he read the front page I was straining to see the sports page. Just to prise me from his paper, he would take the inside pages and toss them at me.

So basically, the teacher would have to hit her head against a rock trying to get my attention.

So from reality, I would occasionally drift right there in class and let my imagination run wild. Rooted in the material I used to read about fighter pilots and comic book heroes I imagined myself a pilot. I was determined to become one even if I had to fail my primary to get there.

Unfortunately, life does not work like that. I just had to go through the boring lessons, the arithmetic, the spelling (I didn’t need that) and other debilitating manoeuvres that did more to destroy my dream than build on it.

Why do I say so? You see it was unheard of that a pupil at this stage would stand up and declare that they wanted to be a pilot. This was RHODESIA and as “Africans” as we were referred to, could not possibly become pilots. Teachers or nurses yes, but never a pilot. We simply had no role models in those posts at the time. So dream I did and it looks like I wasn’t wrong. If my teachers had not made a mockery of my dream and ambition, who knows. So it seems I fell back to my other passion which was and still is writing.

At that time, writing was a given but it was the drawing that the teachers took advantage of. It was child labour if you ask me. My talent in drawing saw me being shared among teachers during those legendary radio lessons with “Miss Charles”. This meant that I would catch a series of glimpses of the lessons and then read them later because I had my copy of the manual. What is the point of this? Don’t kill the dream, is the lesson.

Every year for generations, dreams have been stifled at conception. The reason why children dream is because they have inhibition. Children do not worry about bond notes, rent, putting food on the table or how the mortgage will be paid. So they have all the reason to dream.

A dream eventually leads to something definite, say psychologists.

What we are living is what dreams are made of. Someone should tell our teachers that dreaming is OK. Don’t whack the daylights out of students who drift away in your class. Otherwise it means that you should do something about jacking up your teaching skills because the lesson has become BORING.

Without dreaming how would have humankind progressed. Ideas and inventions originate from dreams. Daring to think outside the very box frees us from years of brainwashing.

Dare to dream because being a conformist destroys the spark that gives birth to the next big idea. Unfortunately, what society has done is to instil fear from the time we start “learning.” Just like the clap that Mrs Mpala used with such telling effect to discourage the very process that leads to the conception of a great idea.

For generations, teachers have taken daydreaming to be frivolous and an outward expression of laziness. However, psychologists have found that motivation for success is what daydreams are made of.

Criss Jami puts it so succinctly when she says, “Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.”

That world included my Grade One teacher.

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