TMI People I dream about

Like a lot of people, I indulge in escapist fantasies or daydreams every now and then. Depend on the mood I'm in, in my dream I might be fabulously rich and travelling the world, developing cool new user interfaces, exploring ancient underwater ruins, climbing Mount Everest or getting in on with sexy guys. The TMI label might clue you in to the fact that this post is mainly about the latter sort of dream. I don't really go into any lurid details here, but if you don't want to know who I have fantasies about, you probably don't want to read any further.

The stereotypical escapist fantasy for women is to dream about having sex with Brad Pitt. That doesn't really do anything for me. I've got nothing against Brad; he's a cute guy, but he's not really my thing. Here are some of the guys I have dreamed about:

David Boreanaz	Falco	George Clooney	Hugh Laurie	Phil Keoghan
Jeff Probst	Julian McMahon	Keith Olbermann	Harrison Ford	Richard Dean Anderson

You'd think that this sort of fantasy was fairly easy to entertain, right? Just pick a guy and imagine snogging him - easy! Unfortunately for me though, I need a big chunk of realism in my fantasies. I can't imagine getting it on with Jeff Probst right now, because I don't actually know him. I have to first envision some plausible scenario in which I could meet him and get to know him. It also has to be something that _could _conceivably happen in this universe. For instance, it can't depend on me being the daughter of a famous actor or wealthy businessman or being a famous supermodel or actress myself. My fantasies also usually involve overcoming various problems, like the fact that they live in other countries, have completely different lifestyles and probably make more in a week than I will in my entire life. These are complex fantasies people!

Some of you may have noticed that some of these guys are, well, getting on a bit now. Harrison Ford and Richard Dean Anderson are now older than my father. In my defence, I don't really have fantasies about them as they are now, but rather I have fantasies about them as they were when they did MacGyver (age 35 to 42) and Indiana Jones (age 39 to 49). The average age of these guys I dream about is around about 42.3 years, about 14 years older than me. I've just always had a thing for older guys.

Because I like my fantasies to be grounded in reality, it's better for me to remain largely ignorant about the actual details of these guys real lives, otherwise it can kill the fantasy. For instance, the Falco fantasy doesn't work for me anymore cos he's, well, dead. And I'm really just not into that.

At one point, Mel Gibson may have been on my fantasy list, but if finding out that he was married with 8 kids wasn't enough, his religious nuttery would tip him over the edge. Nothing puts me off a guy faster than finding out that he's religious. Well, finding out that he's a rapist or murderer would do it, but that sort of thing doesn't often come up in conversation.

Also, I now know that Hugh Laurie & Phil Keoghan are married with kids. I just don't like adultery in my fantasies, so once I found that out, that pretty much dropped them out of the fantasy rotation. Please don't tell me the relationship status of the others - I'd rather be able to imagine they are all single.

Now, I don't actually know anything at all about any of these guys. They might be arrogant jackasses, wimpy mummy's boys or chauvinist republicans for all I know. It doesn't matter, because I supply the personality in my fantasy. I take the name, face, body and the basic details of their life (year and country of birth, general career outline) and use that as a framework to hang the personality of my ideal guy. That way they all turn out to be charming, confident, capable, funny and kind.

I could, of course, just make up a guy with the required attributes, and quite often, I do. It's just that then I have to think up a name and piece together a fairly elaborate back story. I told you, my fantasies have to be fairly realistic. I also find it quite hard to think up a good consistent physical description. Fantasizing about these guys is really just a bit of a shortcut on my part. To save myself the character development, I just borrow the face and name of someone famous.