Though I have not yet had this conversation with a fellow grad student, and maybe they would not admit to it anyway, I would be surprised if other students didn't have similar fantasy storylines running through their heads. It's always more common when I am working on grand new multidisciplinary ideas (some of which I find in print ten years or so later from someone else, as grand new ideas, so perhaps I ought to start submitting some of those for publication somewhere), but even more mundane papers and projects can lead to these great daydreams. In these stories, I finish my paper/project, turn it in, get a really good grade (of course), and then am drawn into some world crisis or conference, or offered an opportunity of a lifetime, because of my paper/project and its/my obvious brilliance. It would be silly to really expect many of these to ever really happen, yet for anyone trying to generate new knowledge it may be healthier to believe these stories than to dismiss them.
Lots of students I've talked with lately are going through a lot of self-doubt, brought on by the stress of upcoming finals, term paper deadlines and all the rest. There are often a lot more students dealing with anxiety and depression symptoms around this time, and most large campuses have stress clinics to mitigate this. One thing they don't seem to mention much, if at all, is these larger-than-life fantasies. I would bet that for the students experiencing depression or self-doubt, these stories have been displaced by other stories, about failure and its worst consequences.
Early in a semester, my images of myself in my fantasies are triumphant and happy; I may be a well-respected professor at Oxford, or the behind-the-scenes mastermind for the leadership that unites the world in a great global system not unlike the Star Trek or Babylon-5 systems of Earth governance. If I have a guy I am inclined to weave into my fantasies, one I know or someone off a film, he is also very successful, accomplishing equally great if not greater things, and there is always a happy ending.
At this point in a semester, the stories have changed. The paper/project that was to save the world is now awful, and causes me to fail the whole class, something much easier to imagine, unfortunately, in grad school, where a C is essentially a failing grade. This is never the end though; it gets better. In the slow boring versions, I simply drop out, losing my job in the process of course, lose my apartment, and wind up living under a bridge somewhere, trying to feed my cat as best I can. Alternatively I might wind up living in my mom's unfinished basement, with all the spiders and sand scorpions, and I live out the rest of my days there. At least so long as I am not actually going through a depression at the same time, this is where the stories leave off, though both of these have their preferred suicidal endings too. The most exciting was one where I lived under a bridge along a creek or river, and was swept away to my death by a sudden flood from a dam-breach upstream, an ending I dreamed a few years ago.
The guys who featured in the earlier stories are not necessarily absent, but when they also play different roles. A common plot-line some years is that that the guy in question might have been interested in me, but my awful paper/project has shown me to be just a puffed up fool, and in no way desirable. The really soap-operatic version of this starts out disarmingly pleasant, so the guy and I have a few days or weeks of a nice relationship, out of which when everything falls apart I am not only under a bridge or in Mom's basement, but pregnant as well. (Those who have known me for a while may imagine how truly horrific I might find such a fantasy.) There's a woman in Atlas Shrugged, out in the village near the motor factory where Dagny and Hank find Galt's motor, who looks haggard and old, and turns out to be just a bit older than Dagny- that's the mental image that I turn into in this particular flavor of fantasy.
These contrasting fantasy types, triumphant and miserable, are a carrot and stick of motivation. The bad fantasies, while very effective at keeping my head out of the clouds, provide nothing to strive for. So long as I am struggling to write papers just to keep from failing, or avoiding getting too close to people out of the expectation of future rejection, there is little chance I will ever stray very far from the verge of failure.
The good fantasies, to the extent that I can believe them to be possible, are a shining future, a goal that justifies whatever effort is required to attain it. Far from being arrogant, these are fantasies of self-efficacy, images of oneself as capable and worthwhile, and with this sort of self-image, any set-backs are just temporary and can be overcome. Will I ever actually attain a future life like what I imagine in these stories? Maybe not the power behind a global throne, and perhaps my name won't be as well remembered as that of Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill, but a professorship and a good academic reputation is well within what my own professors seem to envision for me.
So, for the rest of this semester, at least, here's the overall future I am expecting for myself. I'm a well-known professor and intellectual figure, widely read across most of the social sciences and physical sciences. My academic work is proving quite useful within quite a few fields of study, and my books for the non-specialist public are instant favorites. I live in my favorite fantasy straw-bale walled house, custom built with art gallery, greenhouse and courtyard spaces, and surrounded by a very successful 250 acre land reclamation botanic garden, with my amazing partner, our cats and other animals(otterhound, ?), and an ever changing array of family and friends who come to visit, or to live with us between jobs and other adventures.
Will it all actually happen? The problem with trying to predict life is that anything might happen. I may be struck by lightning walking home tonight, or aliens might invade next week (Exterminieren! Exterminieren!), but so long as I am alive, I'd better believe that this or something better is my future.
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