• 09 Dec, 2025 *

A young boy talking to his G.I. Joe or a young girl chatting with her doll is usually seen as harmless imagination. We assume those conversations are simply products of a developing mind—children projecting life onto their toys because their brains aren’t fully formed. But I have also seen adults engaging in imaginary conversations in public, complete with animated gestures. We might instinctively label them as mentally unstable. Except they are not. Certainly not clinically insane.

For the person immersed in such dialogue, the experience feels vivid. It is as if the imagined interlocutor is seated right across from them, prompting natural speech, expressive hand movements, and bodily reactions. They even anticipate responses and counter them as they would in a real exchange. This continues until another task interrupts the sequence.

All of us are guilty of having imaginary conversations when we are alone. Most of us simply don’t enact them in public. We rehearse dialogues with real people, using our actual voice in our imagination, with the same tone, the same emphases, and a perfectly clear visualisation of the setting. It feels like a dream sequence unfolding in front of us.

It resembles a dream but is rooted in a missing reality—an argument we never had but wish we had, a conversation we wanted to prolong, a moment we hoped would unfold differently. In this alternate reality, the person we love reciprocates, the person we dislike loses the argument, and we become more articulate than we ever managed to be in actual life.

These imaginary conversations reveal the unmet desires we quietly harbour. They allow us to impose a sense of control that we lack in our real circumstances. We seek closure for our pain, validation for our emotions, and reciprocation of our feelings. The control we cannot exert in reality, we enforce—subtly but powerfully—in this alternate world.

This is precisely why the habit becomes dangerous for our mental stability. What happens when, instead of speaking our mind during genuine confrontation, we perfect our arguments only in an imagined realm? This alternate reality, refined and replayed, erodes our ability to separate truth from illusion. The mind grows comfortable in illusion. Soon we lose sleep, struggle to focus on important tasks, and find ourselves unable to hold simple conversations. These are natural consequences of a mind drifting out of alignment with reality.

You must step out of it at any cost. Make peace with what is. Your unfulfilled love was not meant to be; it is healthier to find contentment in what you have and, if possible, open yourself to new possibilities. The hypothetically flawless argument will never arrive, because achieving it requires calmness, lower anxiety, and less self-consciousness—all by-products of being grounded in the present.

Cultivate a sharper awareness of your surroundings. The only reality that exists is what you are living from microsecond to microsecond, in the time it takes to breathe. With every blink, you move further away from the past. All your heartbreaks and insults survive only through memory—the moments themselves have already vanished. Don’t keep everything alive. Learn to forgive, detach, and step away from that outdated version of yourself. See your environment as if you are encountering it for the first time.

Whenever possible, meditate. You don’t need anything elaborate—just sit with your thoughts for a few minutes. Let them rise and swirl. Observe them without reacting. Let them resolve on their own. Think of them as your wishes and desires, desperate attempts to rewrite reality—but reality does not bend that way. You must let go of these alternate scripts and slowly learn to accept the world as it is.

The past and the future exist only in the mind. There is only one true reality: the breath you take, the choices you make or refuse to make. It is the only domain where you possess any semblance of control. It is the only thing that will ultimately become your past. Everything else is one vast illusion.