When was the last time you found your thoughts drifting away? You may have watched the rain outside, listened to the water washing the pebbles around the beach, or you were in flow. Either way, it will have taken a while before you realised it happened and you probably just shrugged it off – maybe shaking your head a little or otherwise trying to wake yourself up and get back to the business at hand.

Most of us are entrenched in daily life and nothing much will draw us out. There are always obligations: work plays a huge role and takes up a lot of time and effort, you may have family members to take care of, keep your household in working order, school runs, etc. Besides, we feel that we have to fill our free time with activities on top of all that: sports, festivals, arts, meeting friends, going out.

It’s a sign of the times that we simply won’t allow ourselves to be inactive. Inactivity is regarded as frivolous and unproductive. Modern society runs on people being run down, it seems. Daydreaming is the healthy opposite to the rat race we find ourselves immersed in! I believe that it is akin to meditation, but without the conscious effort of dropping into a relaxed state of nothingness.

Daydreaming has huge benefits, of course. If you have found yourself lost in though lately, you’ll have felt a sense of calm and maybe even joy at simply being alone with your thoughts. You have let go of the wheel and allowed your mind to take you where it naturally wanted to go. That is often the best way to get you into a state of blissful floating with the tides of your thoughts.

I believe that the ability to daydream shows that our minds are occasionally allowed to run free. Why were you so quick to dismiss these occasions? Daydreaming moments are precious and should not just be shrugged off: each of them is a special occasion to be cherished!

There is one important area where most people get seriously confused: the idea that the ‘passive’ in the context of gay sexuality is synonymous with ‘sub’ or ‘bottom’. Because in fact, it isn’t. Let’s take a look at these pairs: active/passive, top/bottom, dom/sub, masculine/feminine and get some perspective on those terms.

Active simply describes who at any given time is the more physically active partner in a couple, passive is the one who is relatively less physically active. Let’s be clear about this: during any encounter, it is likely that not only the level of activity will increase and decrease and may even switch to the other partner. The main thought here is to do with physical effort.

Top and bottom are technical descriptions of the relationship between two guys during an encounter, who puts what into whom: the top is simply the partner who inserts something into the bottom’s body (usually a cock in a bum, but that could be a probe, or a couple of fingers in a mouth, etc.).

The third set of opposites is dom/sub: the dom is the one who calls the shots, the sub is the one who gives his consent for things to happen. From a viewpoint of Tantra, we are looking at an surprisingly popular incarnation of the masculine (doing an activity) and feminine (allowing the activity) aspects of sexual energies. It’s a psychological relationship rather than to do with the actual activities.

Masculine and feminine are especially strange terms as they could simply be a gender description, but it could refer to the sexual role at a given moment (being a bottom or submissive). I would stay clear of using those terms to describe the relationship of sexual partners.

The confusion stems from the fact that the majority of guys treat ‘active’ and ‘top’ as synonyms (with elements of ‘masculine’ or ‘dom’ thrown in for good measure), but they don’t always align. Being active does not necessarily mean you are a top: just think of power bottoms (active and bottom – and receptive), and being a dom does not imply this has to be a man.