TreeHouseView

Magic is nothing new to me and my ways of thinking, and I often forget that most people don’t think along the same nonsensical lines as I do. As practical as I present, I live with a part of me in a fairy tale world–whether it’s from the tales of my childhood or from more recent imaginings, I find that I can spin a fantastical tale out of the most mundane of happenings.

I’ve also always been a very vivid dreamer, to the point that sleep is not restful because I wake up feeling like I’ve lived another existence and my brain has not had any recuperation. Maybe because I’m a terrible sleeper, and that includes falling asleep, staying asleep, and all of the sleeping, at some point I started to concoct stories while I would lie awake at night hoping sleep would eventually find me.

These stories became so lucid that I would recall them like they had actually happened to me. Not a dream, but an actual lived experience. They became something somewhere between a sleepy dreamy reality that I could alter if I chose–but the stories were always similar and usually centered on romantic encounters. Fantasies, if you will. Research for all of the books I have in my head that I want to write…that I’m writing in my head…

I realized just the other day how blurry the lines between fantasy and reality had become when one of those very first fantastical memories came back to me out of nowhere while I was driving and I had to actually concentrate for a moment to remember if it was real or made up. That actually gave me pause…I wasn’t sure if I should take pride in my strong imagination or perhaps be a tad concerned that fantasy and reality had overlapped so easily.

The dream world has only ever been kind to me, though. I don’t generally have nightmares and have only had the occasional unsettling or upsetting dream. My relationship to sleep seems a confusing one, as I don’t sleep well, but I will “sleep in” like a teenager, and it’s usually in those broken hours where dreams I don’t want to be woken from occur.

But because I can’t control actual dreams, I much prefer my guided method of pre-sleep dreamy fantasies where I concoct relationships and travels and memories that could easily translate into the stories I want to tell–oh, so many stories!

There is magic everywhere, in everything. You just have to want to see it, hear it, feel it. It’s there…like smoke in a bottle. Take the lid off and let out some magic…