The recesses of my mind

Since the end of April I have felt a bit of a lull in my ideas for posts, I think it has something to do with the fact that I posted so many things in April that I felt a bit worn out. To get myself back into the swing of things I went looking for inspiration and stumbled across a Daily Post course called Finding Everyday Inspiration, a twenty day challenge to get me back into writing and to help me find some inspiration. I’m not going to post them up everyday, I’m going to spread this one out a bit…here is day one.

Why do you write?

I write because…for as long as I can remember I’ve had dreams. Vivid and eccentric and completely nonsensical dreams. It’s like having a mini movie playing in my head but its not linear. It comes together like layers, sometimes I jump from one layer to the next and even though its entirely disjointed, it always seems to make sense to me.

When I was younger I used to write my dreams down as stories, they were all very simple dreams usually abut owning a dog and the adventures we would have, or being a princess, or the other simplistic things that my younger self thought about. As I got older and I started to read my imagination grew and so did my dreams. They would be in alternate universes or in a dystopian version of earth or in space; they would involve all sorts of scenarios love, hate, fear, rebellion, wonder, magic, fantasy and adventure.

I don’t remember the dreams I had when I was younger, all that is left of them is the stories that I wrote, because my grandfather has kept all the ones he could get his hands on. Now however they stay with me and I noticed that they would stay with me after I had woken up; my mind would start to make more sense of what was happening and it would create a world around the original dream. I could be standing in school, then later university and then onto work and I would be doing tasks but there would also be this story playing out in my head. The characters would interact and they would change and become more solid. The scenarios would no longer be layers jumping from one level to the next, but I would sort them out into a linear fashion. I would start to make sense of what was happening, all without really trying. It’s not something I actively have to think about, it’s just always there in the back of my mind.

Occasionally the story will stop and there wont be a conclusion, or there will be a missing piece, but then one day when I’m not thinking about it something will pop into my head and I’ll know that its a part of that story. It’s the bit that is missing and it joins all the current pieces together or at least lets the flow continue until it comes to the next hole.

To some it might sound quite crazy or it might sound really familiar, but this is the crux of why I want to write, because of these fantastical stories that are animating themselves through my thoughts. These worlds that are only mine, I want to get them down on paper so that I can share them, I also want to write them down so that I don’t forget. I want to look back one day when I am a lot older and remember all the crazy things that happened while I slept, because what if it doesn’t last forever, what if I don’t always have these adventurous narrative dreams. I know it would be a big part of me that would suddenly be missing but if I record them all on paper then I have something tangible to hold onto. I’ll know that it happened once upon a time and I’ll be able to immerse myself in my own imagination once again.

Conversely I want to write about my worlds because I would like one day for my words to have the same affect on someone else, I want to be the contributing factor for someone else’s imagination, for someone else’s dreams. I want other people to think “wow it must have been amazing to be there, in that world” and then to think up one of their own, so the cycle will always continue.

All my stories are locked in my head, some are scribbled down on scraps of paper, none are fully formed. This is why I want to write and why I am writing now, because they wont be able to stay in my head forever.

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