Imagine to Remember

As a child I had vivid dreams in my sleep and vivid visions in waking. I had hunches and premonitions and watched them come to pass. I had moments of such intense joy running, screaming, swinging and laughing. I had absolute serenity. I was fixating on the ray of sunlight coming through the veins and cells of a single leaf. I was the author of intense dramas and the director of epic sagas. This did not make me special, I was in fact a very ordinary child. I had, as we all did, the extraordinary powers of children, the acute sensitivity that makes everything incredibly joyous or incredibly painful. And I grew to be an ordinary adult, losing most of my capacity to dream, wonder and create. 

There is however one of these faculties that has always stayed with me, the capacity to imagine. Not the kind of imagination that is expansive, but a different sort of imagination entirely. It is kind of imagining that binds, it draws the curtains closed and the shutters too, to hide from the world. I needed to hide and this gave me a way out, an escape, a retreat into the corners of my mind where I could be safe, fantasizing endlessly. A world where I created and changed rules at a whim, drawing and redrawing maps, creating and destroying, becoming the arbiter of my own reality. In some way maybe this was its own gift, all my neuroses; maladaptive daydreaming, panic, intrusive thoughts, obsessions, compulsions, paranoias gave me a sort of a rich innerworld; painful and dark yes but also full and complete in its own way, distracting me from the real world with all its pain, complexity,  and responsibility. Sometimes I wonder if this capacity for imagining may have saved me from potentially more dangerous vices which I saw many of my friends turn to as they also tried to look for solace and escape. Our young lives were marked by pain and chaos and each of us in our own ways looked for the balm that would soothe wounds and make it all better. But as with all coping mechanisms, they never really make you better. They will, for a time, distract you, numb you, thrill you, entertain you, scare you, keep you busy, flood your body with a pleasure you didn’t think was possible. But it’s always there waiting for you, on the other side.