You won’t have any errands to do, meals to cook, and your partner and colleagues will have to fend for themselves.

You’ll have food brought to your bedside, clean sheets changed out for you, silence or TV of your choosing.

You won’t have any responsibilities or obligations other than to just be there and rest while others look after you…

Now tell me: did some part of you really secretly like that idea?

If you’re like so many overwhelmed, exhausted, burnt out adults that come to therapy, probably you did.

I call this The Hospital Fantasy and it’s a big clue that you have some personal work to do.

Here’s why.

What the “Hospital Fantasy” teaches us:

The “Hospital Fantasy” as I call it is, quite simply, a catastrophic, conflated, or exaggerated daydream that signals that some part of you is in greatly in need.

You may not have the “Hospital Fantasy” per say, but you may have other versions of it where the content and narrative of the fantasy looks different:

Perhaps your dream looks more like running away to a cottage in the Scottish Highlands where you can be alone for three months.

Or maybe it looks like ditching your life and making your way to Montana to work at a simple hourly job as a waitress in a small town diner.

Alternatively, if you may imagine divorcing your spouse, selling all your belongings, and moving to Australia to live out of a van in a beach town.

Whatever the content of your own particular recurring fantasy, whether it’s catastrophic or not, there is likely a big clue in there waiting for you.

Where do these fantasies come from anyway and should we really pay attention to them?

Why do we have spontaneous, seemingly destructive or self-sabotaging fantasies?

I personally think it’s a cry from our soul, our psyche, our unconscious. That we are ignoring some big need of ours. And so some part of us acts out in imagination and reverie to get our attention.

Why do we have fantasies like this?

Well, being a working adult in this modern world alone primes most of us to be set up for overwork. Also – overwhelm, and under-attuning to ourselves.

Add onto it parenting, breadwinning, adulting, coping with unprocessed trauma from your childhood that consumes your mental or emotional energy, a lack of modeling and support in setting healthy and appropriate boundaries, financial pressures, and more, all of this can add up to a time (or times) in your life when a part of you may long for something catastrophic or fantastical to compensate and reorient your life.

But should we really pay attention to these fantasies?

Yes and no.