The Ally McBeal syndrome, or Sunday evening ramblings...

I often wonder if anyone else has what I have come to call ”the Ally McBeal syndrome”. Even if you are familiar with Ally McBeal, I am guessing it would not be immediately clear what I mean, seeing #1 I made up the term, and #2 Ms. McBeal had many an issue. So let me explain. Every so often, Ally lapses into fantasy-type daydreams, where like all daydreams I suppose, she momentarily loses sight of the world she before her eyes and is lost in the world she sees in her head. And this happens in the most inopportune of moments: while in a conversation with someone else, at work, in court, walking down the street… She hears a song in a head and closes her eyes and dances to it. She has an imaginary conversation, gets so angry that she she punches the guy out with a suddenly oversized fist...only to realise that he is not actually there. It often takes a moment for her to get back to where she is.

Does that happen to anyone else, I wonder. I assume it does, but it is just something that people never think to discuss with each other. At the risk of coming across a bit loony, as Ms. McBeal certainly does sometimes, I confess that it happens to me quite often actually, though not quite to the extent as it does to Ms. McBeal. I realised many years ago, however, this is does not happen to everyone. So what I really wonder is how many people experience this, in particular if any one I know experiences this.

I have always been a bit behind the times when it came to technology and gadgets. I was one of the last amongst my friends to get a mobile phone. Similarly, I did not have an MP3 player of any description for a long time. Because of this, I discovered running with music rather late in life. A friend of mine tried to explain to me the difference it makes to run with music. I explained that I always had a song in my head while I was running anyway, so I did not actually need an external input. He could not understand that. Other than occasionally having a song involuntarily stuck in ones head, he could not understand the concept of having a song in ones head. Some songs I hear so clearly in my head that I am singing along at the top of my voice, in my head of course. That was my first indication that perhaps not everyone else's brain worked the same way as mine. And as always, any insight into how the brain works in general, and how my brain works in particular, is fascinating to me.

In any case, this is basically the same sort of thing which is seeing a sort of resurgence in my life. Except it is not limited to songs. I am having full blown daydreams, sometimes about completely random things. Other times, the daydreams are not so random. That is to say, that I can figure out how or why I had come to have certain thoughts or images. Sometimes, they are from my memory. Others from my desires. Anyway, it sometimes happens to the extent that I find myself having paused what I was doing and literally, just spaced out. And this has happened at equally inopportune moments as they did to Ally McBeal and thankfully, not quite as often. Once, I ”woke up” during a conversation with the boss to realise that he had asked my opinion about a discussion which I had totally spaced out on. This was, thankfully, on the phone, so I could fake a bad connection and ask him to repeat. Another time, I suddenly realised during yoga that everyone else had moved on to the next pose while I was lost in my thoughts. And while I do not see these daydreams in technicolor as Ally did, they are sometimes real to the point that they trigger an emotional and even physical response. I sometimes catch my breath, or my heart rate increases and my chest tightens. While I am able to keep it under control most of the time, every once in a while, a small lapse in concentration takes on a life of its own.

Part of me finds it extremely interesting that I am able to create these emotions and responses myself, essentially, by my own conscious or subconscious thoughts. Another part of me concludes that this must be what actors do on a regular basis, the good ones anyway, to get into character and scene, to produce a performance that is real and full of emotion. But how do we do it? How do we artifically create a stimulus to invovke a chemical response which changes our mood? I think it's fascinating!

So, what was the point of this story? To be honest, I have absolutely no idea. It is Sunday evening, and I am rambling. I suppose I am just wondering how these things happen."What are daydreams?" or something along those lines is probably going to feature in one of my next google searches. How is it that a thought, a picture, a tune can trigger such an elaborate response in the brain? Come to think of it, which part of the brain is it which is triggered? It is memory or creativity? Or something totally different altogether?