I’ve always had a big imagination.
I’m surprised I haven’t gotten into trouble with my imagination yet.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been cooking up these wild, elaborate scenes in my mind and then acting them out.
For example, I was really into mythological Chinese movies when I was younger because there were a lot of martial arts in them.
There were always specific scenes that stuck in my head for days, and I couldn’t stop thinking about them.
But I wasn’t one of those kids that just sat around daydreaming and re-running them in my mind.
Oh, no -I was one of those rare kids who acted out the scenes. And I would add additional dialogue and fight sequences as well.
I remember this one time, I was in the middle of a “battle” and had to go to the washroom. So, I pretended like my army was losing the fight and we had to retreat.
As I was in the washroom relieving myself, I pretended my soldiers were there with me as we re-cooperated and thought of a new strategy to fight our enemies. I even thought up a speech and gave it!
And when I finished in the bathroom, I went right back to the fight, implementing my new game plan.
I wanted to make the battles realistic, too, so I pretended to get hurt during battles, which actually gave me scrapes and bruises because I bumped into tables and shelves and dragged my knees on the rug as I fell from powerful flying kicks.
I was an 8 or 9-year-old kid, just fighting imaginary bad guys all day, every day in our family room.
I was such a stupid kid.
Also, there was this other time when I was peeing and bubbles formed in the toilet. I don’t know why, but I imagined these bubbles were enemy islands and the flow was a stream of bullets from a fighter jet, raining down on them.
When the “bullets” ran out, the last few droplets acted as missiles that blew up and flushed away all of the enemy islands.
These were the types of things I was imagining as a kid.
My creativity has dwindled quite a bit as I aged but I still have a pretty decent imagination.
For instance, I was walking around a dollar store with my niece and we came upon this stupid-looking insect trap.
She asked me how it would be effective and I came up with some silly method, where an insect would crawl into the trap, start losing oxygen, bump its head on the walls as it stumbles around looking for the exit, get a concussion and die from lack of treatment.
After my explanation, she looked up at me and snarkily said, “You have a big imagination.”
This is how my brain works. Good thing I’m a writer or else I don’t know what I would be doing with this world-building and idea creation.