I’VE never been the ambitious type. I’ve always daydreamed and my sweetest memories of school were of looking out the window during class and daydreaming about the world out there.

In fact, I always prayed at the start of every new schooling year that I would get a prized window seat in my classroom from which I could perpetually daydream at every given opportunity.

Now that I am an adult with school-going children, I reflect back on the standard (and limited) occupations my-then school teachers and textbooks used to encourage us to think about “when I grow up”.

With the benefit of hindsight, there wasn’t much really. In primary school, it was the usual cookie cutter public service occupations – policeman, fireman, doctor, teacher, pilot, soldier, etc.

In high school, well, at least for my generation – Generation X – I don’t recall much dream occupations that my teachers used to make us think about.

The 1990s was an interesting time to be a teenager.

I daydreamed about being a sportsman because I really enjoyed sports – tennis particularly.

My dad used to record live telecasts of Grand Slam tournament finals – the Australian Open, the French Open (aka Roland Garros), Wimbledon and the US Open – on VHS tape.

I used to watch this religiously but not so much to take notes on what the champions were doing right but just daydreaming what it must feel like being a professional tennis player.

In reality, I wasn’t training hard or working out to be a great tennis player. I maintained playing once a week on Sundays with my dad at the university courts and with some friends there. Constantly daydreaming that I was playing in some big tournament on live television.

In my mid-teens, of course, I discovered music and the focus on my daydreaming moved on to being not so much a great and famous musician but the romantic idea of being an “artist” or writer.

Again, I wasn’t particularly super-talented. I didn’t write my first song at three years old nor did I perform my first concerto at seven years old.

I was a competent kid who could play the piano well until Grade 3, because my parents kept sending me for lessons with a piano teacher who was kind to me but fierce with others (I still don’t know why). 

In those years when I was competent at playing the piano, never did it ever occur to me that I would be a musician. Classical European music was too removed and alien to me – I didn’t “feel” it.

It was only when I discovered rock music that something lit up in me and I started turning my tennis racquet around to play air guitar instead in front of the mirror.

Again, none of my actions steered me into greater competency. I was still perpetually daydreaming – daydreaming I was in an imaginary music video while miming to the song on my Walkman looking into a mirror.

Nor did I have or meet friends in high school who played music; I was in the wrong school and lived in the wrong neighbourhood.

It was in college that everything came into fruition. I met peers who shared my similar daydreaming but they had friends to daydream with.

In other words, they were doing everything I was daydreaming about, primarily because they lived in suburbia – Subang Jaya.

When I was 18, I discovered what colleges were for and walked into a jamming studio for the first time.

Still, I daydreamed but now my daydreams were taking shape into some form or another, be it songs, coming up with band names, or mimicking my favourite songs.

I also began to realise that all those years I spent daydreaming were not wasted – they were my incubation period.

I also had the benefit of realising that I was daydreaming too much and it was time to make things happen now that I had peers and a broader network of friends and fellow freaks to orientate myself from.

All the while still never having any real ambition to be a professional anything and I look back with no regrets.

I almost wanted to be an accountant. Imagine that, I would’ve been rich by now but I would be buying guitars not making songs and performing.

I still daydream a lot nowadays, it’s never left me. In fact, I daydreamed about this piece earlier on and now it bore fruit.

Daydreaming is wonderful because it’s a form of psychological and emotional inoculation that everyone tries to steer you away from when in actual fact it’s something we all need to keep some innocence and sense of wonder for ourselves. It’s yours.

Don’t give yourself too much to the world. Look out your window, less at your Windows (pun intended). – April 14, 2023.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.