Exploring Your Fantasies with Euphemia Russell
Fantasies can be a potent and playful path to exploring new possibilities that live deep within us but need space to emerge. They can be a powerful way of communicating with yourself.
Our imagination can stretch our existing beliefs to what we currently believe we deserve, desire and need. We can rewrite scripts and reimagine new realities about ourselves, others, and life.
Your fantasyscape can be your secret realm for exploring the fluidity of the self, in rich and boundless ways. Fantasy can lure you into infinite ways of being, doing, feeling, seeing and desiring, exposing yourself to possibilities and therefore increasing your awareness of choices on your pleasure dial.
We can fantasise our ideal experiences in the seemingly fantastical and then bring them into reality if we wish to, or keep them in the fantasyscape for a myriad of reasons.
Fantasy as a mirror for our desires
Your known or not yet realised needs and desires often shape your current fantasies.
Philosopher Slavoj Zizek said, ‘Through fantasy we learn how to desire.’ Esther Perel, the legendary sex therapist, later said in her book Mating In Captivity, ‘Fantasies are like mirrors. We hold them in front of us in order to see what else is behind.’
Your desires don’t need to be kinky or outrageous to be valid; they’re longings for how you want to feel and be, even for brief moments. Your fantasies can also reflect your current needs, as you explore the question: how do I want to feel in this moment? Through fantasy, you can explore potential ‘what if’ scenarios with little impact or consequence.
Pleasure practice
Without limiting your desires, think of a situation and imagine your ideal experience or outcome. Don’t worry about what might be supposedly possible or not possible. Be fantastical! Be beautifully mundane! Feel into your 'what if' scenarios. How does it feel to explore your beliefs of what is possible?
How fantasies connect with and impact reality
Fantasy is a powerful tool for sexual desire and sexual response. We have the ability to orgasm in response to fantasy, from mental sexual stimulation with no bodily touch. Isn’t this wild! Think about arousal and orgasms in your sleep. The sensory cortex, the part of the brain responsible for receiving sensory information, lights up for mental sexual stimulation just as it does for physical sexual stimulation.
The mind and body aren’t separate, they’re interwoven. This means they inevitably impact each other. So our fantasies deserve to be treated with care.
It is very common to fantasise about experiences that you never want to happen in real life, whether that’s because of a potential misalignment in values or any other factors.
We need to be intentional and thoughtful with our imagination, as our fantasies can reshape our realities and affect the way we act and what we value.
Maybe you’d like to bring elements of those fantasies into reality. Or not. Perhaps leaving them in the fantasyscape will give them more seductive power, or maybe that’s more appropriate or ever-fulfilling.
I like to remind the middle-schoolers I used to teach that porn is mostly for entertainment and sensationalism. It’s literally watching people at work.
It is very common to fantasise about experiences that you never want to happen in real life, whether that’s because of a potential misalignment in values or any other factors.
Withholding can increase intensity, taboo and shame.
The feeling of something being taboo or off-limits can be a huge turn-on for people – not being ‘allowed’ to do something can make it more appealing, so be slow and thoughtful in how you navigate taboos.
Fantasies can also be a way to process big emotions and experiences, allowing them to exist fully for a brief period without resisting or denying their existence. This can often take the power out of them. As the psychologist Carl Jung said, ‘what we resist persists’. For example, you can masturbate and explore processing intense emotions that you've been resisting, like jealousy, anger, sadness or grief. In fantasy, and the container of pleasure, you can fully feel that feeling and integrate it for a moment to take the pressure or power out of it.
Of course, it is not all or nothing. We can practice titration with our big feelings and fantasies too, exploring these in small supported doses so the big feelings don’t completely overflow into life. This is obviously not a therapy practice, but it can be therapeutic.
Porn and fantasies
I like to remind the middle-schoolers I used to teach that porn is mostly for entertainment and sensationalism. It’s literally watching people at work. This can be easy to forget, because we are watching an intimate moment that we don’t often witness. Also, like most current mainstream media, the intensity and speculation is intensifying.
As I see, porn, in essence, is watching any kind of person experience any kind of pleasure. But mainstream porn, like most mainstream media representation, is scarily narrow and prescriptive. Mainstream porn can narrow people’s range and expectation of fantasy and desire. It can portray particular bodies, social dynamics and sexual positions, and ways of experiencing pleasure as ‘normal’, common and expected.
It’s challenging to see a generation who don’t have access to education about pleasure, who inevitably conflate entertainment with reality because no one is talking to them about what sex is and can be, grow up on highly accessible internet porn. We all deserve to understand our own sexuality and desires.
I also ran porn screenings for two years because I wanted to show people that their beliefs about what porn is are limited. I wanted to expose them to production houses that do great work, and represent different identities, bodies and desires. If you’re intrigued to see my porn production house suggestions, visit: www.euphemiarussell.com/slowpleasureresources.
Porn can give us so much inspiration, permission, and expanded possibilities for our pleasure dial. It’s also a good reminder that our fantasies can be shaped by the media and aren’t necessarily our truest desires.
This can help to gently interrogate our greater desires. We need to realise the power of our fantasies and desires in order to transform the future.
Reflective questions:
Do you use fantasies and imagination when you masturbate?
Do you depict yourself in fantasies as different to how you are in the world? What is your motivation or desire behind this?
Have you had a fantasy that you would never want to fulfil in real life?
What needs or desires do your current fantasies reflect?
Cultivate your ‘secret garden’. You may never actually want to do it in real life – that’s okay. What is your current fantasy? Your ‘ideal scene’? Let your mind wander when you self-pleasure, oscillate between touch and fantasy.
Pleasure practice
I encourage you to practise fantasising by letting your mind wander. Flick through snippets of feelings and desires and see what you feel a bodily response to that day. This practice can take time to develop, like training a muscle.
Allow your mind to wander to something you might be desiring at the moment. Explore your ‘peripheral vision’. Fantasise about particular sensations, a scene, person/people, places, bodies you want to touch or to exist in, experiences that you have no connection to, lovers or potential future lovers. Cultivate your ‘secret garden’. You may never actually want to do it in real life – that’s okay. What is your current fantasy? Your ‘ideal scene’? Let your mind wander when you self-pleasure, oscillate between touch and fantasy.
Try fantasising with and without touch, and see how it can magnify pleasure.
You can find Euphemia on Instgram here.