The Process... Lucid Daydreaming

 

    I was always a creative kid…
As an adult, I can sometimes feel alone in a loud-ass room full of people. Half the people milling about on Tiktok, a portion yammering on about things that don’t particularly interest me and the remaining ones “overhearing” that group. None of it is my scene.

    On the off chance that I am eventually directly addressed, my brain has sometimes gone on a small field trip to whatever fictional land it is creating in a given moment while maintaining just enough attention and eye contact to not appear checked out of the conversation in front of me. This is why I prefer text conversations to phone conversations and why I need personal interactions to also include an activity of some sort, because I daydream.

    Not only do I daydream, but I LUCIDLY daydream. I will never deny guilt of this but in the middle of a workout, while at work or in a yard, my mind takes things I see or hear and sends them off into DETAILED fictional people and situations. I will repeat these things to myself or break out my phone and make a note to remember them until I am near my computer. These ideas always come up on Thursdays. What exactly is fiction writing if not lucid daydreams?
Hol’up… Three instances of True Story© over the years have been actual regular dreams of the nighttime variety that I happened to remember enough to sit down and turn into stories, but I am usually wide awake and now always sober when I have these ideas.

    The time spent crafting these ideas helps me with filling the time with something better suited to my physical and mental health; a welcome distraction from whatever might take me off of a productive path, as if the act of what I was already doing wasn’t enough…
[Phlip note: I do not have an attention span, so NOTHING is enough if I am still awake.]
… but it supercharges my creative process. I rarely – I think once in the last two years – reach a point where “I just don’t feel like it” and find myself without a written story to publish at 7:30am EST on Thursday.

    Readers can know just how much time (and excitement) I had on my hands when a truly bespoke story comes down, but can never fully trust that I didn’t plan to drag one out right from the outset (I wrote The Big Payoff in a month and whole of the still-ongoing The Treasure Hunt in three days). What I enjoy, though, is leaving a small something in most stories that I can return to and create a whole NEW one months – years – later if I need. I call these “acorns,” from how a squirrel will hoard and bury acorns and then forget about them, but return to discover a whole new oak tree later on.

    Lucid daydreams…  Without them, I feel my time spent doing just about anything, no matter how mundane OR necessary, would be wasted motion. It isn’t like these stories or posts make me any money or serve as anything other than a hobby I use to entertain myself and a few others, but sometimes I feel the need to share.