building castles in the sky.......

I’m a day dreamer. I build castles in the sky and find expansive landscapes filled with rabbits and old ladies with walking sticks in the clouds. I create, often elaborate, fantasies about the future - next week, next month, next year. Sometimes I play these scenarios over and over in my mind, tweaking them and attempting to create the ultimate game of make believe.

You might call it an over-active imagination, some could even say it’s a profound level of procrastination manifesting itself in the pointless creation of fantasy. 

I just call it filling in time. 

Mostly the minutes, sometimes hours, before I drift off to sleep every night. It’s in those spaces, those dark and quite spaces, where the light of a iPhone or a laptop is missing, where the humming of the television or the background chatter of your housemates is silent. In those moments I make my castles, I draw my pictures, I let my imagination wander. 

My conscious self knows that elaborate fantasies generally stay fantasies, movies aren’t real (even the the ones based on true stories) and for every little girl who grows up to be a princess, there is one who struggles with confidence and fear and putting down words. 

My conscious self knows that the me I create in my fantasies is so incredibly different from the me that is writing this - I’m not quite that quick and witty all the time and my hair is definitely not that great outside in the real world. 

I know that my games of make believe are just a little childish, bordering on ridiculous and perpetrating a notion of perfection that simply doesn’t match with the realities of life and responsibility and paying the rent. 

But it doesn’t stop me. 

And it never will. 

Fantasy shouldn’t just be limited to little girls and boys and science fiction writers. Can’t we all have a little in our lives, can’t we all create castles in the sky? Can’t we stop, for just one moment, and think not of the realities that surround us, but of the possibilities for magic? 

I’m not saying we should forgo our real world to a life inside our own head of our own imagination. 

Well not quite. 

What I am saying, is next time you find your mind wandering and dreaming and staring at the clouds…let it. See where it takes you, see where you end up, see what your castles look like. 

I know I will, because shit, maybe my hair will look that good one day. 

kb xx