I sometimes think about what happens to your mind after you die. Do you become a disembodied conciousness? What would I do if this happened? I probably got this idea stuck in my head from reading Johnny Got His Gun many years ago. It’s about a soldier who was terribly wounded in battle and lost all his limbs, and was unable to see, hear or speak. Oh shit, I’m creeping myself out again. Gotta go read a happy thread. Bye.
Oops! Just re-read the OP. I guess my post isn’t very funny, is it? Sorry.
Sometimes I imagine that objects can think, and they get annoyed with me if I use them for unimportant things. For example, if I use a calculator to calculate something really simple that I just couldn’t be bothered to do in my head, I imagine it being really annoyed at being used for such a stupid task, when in fact it can calculate super difficult stuff that I actually can’t do.
Or I imagine satnav getting annoyed when I programme the route to my gran’s house, which I could probably figure out, and it’s done it a million times before. It would think: “What, you still don’t know this?! Let’s go somewhere exciting, like the beach!”
I’m really quite a terrible person when I make my poor tv watch idiotic morning programmes! I just hope it likes laughing at idiots on Jeremy Kyle too…
I used to wonder, pulling back into the driveway, What if my husband greets me at the door and tells me Momma called? She died over twenty years ago, but I always thought she’s just waiting for me to die, too, so she can resume…
Since I don’t drive anymore, I know when the telephone rings. No surprises.
I know it’s morbid and horrible, but I mentally “rehearse” for the deaths of loved ones. Who do I call first? How will I react? How would I break the news to others? Will I be stoic and efficient and “cold,” or will I have a total breakdown on the spot? Will I disbelieve the news and blame the messenger?
I’m sure this stems partly from my Mitty-esque inner life, and partly from having to track down my mother and brother and tell them of my sister’s death. I know that there’s really no good way to break that sort of news, but I mentally grasp for some better way than I handled it at the time.
How to build a pyramid tomb that would last for 100,000 years.
I have a plan for how I would survive a zombie attack. Everywhere I go, I know exactly what I would do if the zombies attacked me there. For a zombie attack that got to me at my house I have several contingency plans.
We will see if it was a dumb thing to think about of if it was important planning when I am posting after the zombie apocalypse.
SFC Schwartz
Heh. I didn’t know that this sort of daydream was so common!
Mine’s a bit different, though. Instead of imagining myself being a suspect or questioned by the police, I have this daydream that keeps me occupied when shoveling snow has gone on way too long: characters from the CSI team (Miami, absurdly enough) stand over my corpse and theorize about how I came to be lying dead, face first in the snow. Horatio makes pithy remarks.
Zombies.
What would I do if there were a real zombie outbreak? Where would I go? How would I defend myself?
I sometime think about how I’d support myself if I traveled back in time to some earlier era. Would my skills be useful? Could I go back and forth and make money in the present as an antiques dealer? A friend of mine once mentioned she had similar thoughts, and planned to support herself as a pop songwriter by writing out all the classic hit songs she could remember. (I asked her if she got the idea from the movie Peggy Sue Got Married, but she’d never seen it.)
When the new style dollar bills began to be introduced I was a little disappointed because I wouldn’t be able to spend them if I traveled back in time a few years/decades. I guess I could still stock up on singles; the current design of the $1 bill has been in use since the early '60s, and I could buy a lot more for a dollar then than I could now. The year would of course be wrong, but I don’t think it’s common for people to check the year.
As for odd or exaggerated fears, sometimes when walking down a flight of steep stairs or in other mildly precarious situations I start to worry that I’ll fall on my face and my front teeth will be knocked out and wouldn’t that be awful? Because it’s not like they’d heal or grow back, you’d have to get dentures.
I kind of get hung up on certain words, just repeating them in my head over and over again (yes, this has actually kept me awake at night). I watch a lot of hockey, and it’s often player names that get stuck in my brain. Today, since he was the starting goalie for the Habs, I’ve had a constant refrain of “BUDAJ!!” in my head (pronounced Boo-die). Budaj, Budaj, Budaj. Such a fun name!
Don’t even get me started on Wisniewski or Tkachuk!
I do this too…then promptly forget the time. Or when I see someone driving like a maniac, I’ll try and remember the license plate, only to totally forget it 5 minutes later. I make a terrible eye witness!
When the voices in my head are arguing, how do I decide which voice wins the argument.
Well, that sounds perfectly rational and reasonable and practical to me! I do the same, although I think of it terms of rinsing off the soap from top to bottom rather than the dirty armpit water.
Ooh, I have a whole boatload of these.
Some of my favourites:
When I was starting high school, we lived in Edinburgh, and they had double decker busses, on which I rode to school. I liked riding on the top of them, but the roads in Scotland are fairly narrow and it was a mite nerve-wracking every time one of these turned the corner. So I used to spend quite a lot of time planning how I would best survive if the whole thing tipped up while cornering and the entire top level went flying.
Needless to say, this never happens.
Whenever I’m walking out in the countryside and I can’t see any buildings - what if the civilized world quietly disappeared while I was out of touch with it? How would I find food, water? How long would it take me to go crazy?
The travelling back in time one too. I generally favour WWII Britain as my setting, and my favourite method of getting the locals to believe in my futuricity is to go find a favourite author of mine and quote bits of their soon-to-be-published works at them until they give up.
There’s also the one where the entire SDMB is spirited away from our day to day lives by aliens and plonked on an island with each other. How long till the axes start flying?
Ooh, I have a whole boatload of these.
Some of my favourites:
When I was starting high school, we lived in Edinburgh, and they had double decker busses, on which I rode to school. I liked riding on the top of them, but the roads in Scotland are fairly narrow and it was a mite nerve-wracking every time one of these turned the corner. So I used to spend quite a lot of time planning how I would best survive if the whole thing tipped up while cornering and the entire top level went flying.
Needless to say, this never happens.
Whenever I’m walking out in the countryside and I can’t see any buildings - what if the civilized world quietly disappeared while I was out of touch with it? How would I find food, water? How long would it take me to go crazy?
The travelling back in time one too. I generally favour WWII Britain as my setting, and my favourite method of getting the locals to believe in my futuricity is to go find a favourite author of mine and quote bits of their soon-to-be-published works at them until they give up.
There’s also the one where the entire SDMB is spirited away from our day to day lives by aliens and plonked on an island with each other. How long till the axes start flying?
What if I justifiably thought, screw all this, I’m going to take out half of our life’s savings, jump on a bus to my dream destination, and take off and start a new life without a word to anyone? Would anyone miss me? Would anyone try to find me? When the bus pulled into my new town, what would I do then, where would I go? To a hotel? Motel? Could I find a job in this new town? … Would anyone be missing me back ‘home’?..
Every time I read or watch Hamlet (which is often, what with me being a Shakespeare professor and all), I have to fantasize about ways to save Hamlet. Like, what if he ran off with the players in Act 3, since this is clearly what he really wants to do? Or what if the mountebank Laertes bought the poison from substituted a sleeping potion a la Cymbeline? Or what if the ghost decided to take some moral responsibility and started haunting Claudius instead of Hamlet, and finally drove him to suicide?
I have been doing this ever since my dad gave me a kiddie “Stories from Shakespeare” book when I was ten. I am sure I have probably worked out hundreds of alternative endings to Hamlet.
Every so often I start obsessing about the death of my kids. I was going to go into detail about all the “what-ifs” that stem from that but 1) it makes me sound completely crazy and 2) I started creeping myself out.
Right around this time of year I go over all the things I’d need to survive a MN winter in the event of any number of implausible happenings which would result in my being homeless (or unable, for whatever reason, to stay in my home) and without money. Most of the time these scenarios include some kind of hostile invasion such that not only do I have to survive the elements and still somehow acquire basic needs, but now I have to also account for other people actively trying to kill me.
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to lead a double life.
I vaguely feel like I’ve heard of a “happy ending” version of Hamlet where the poison was a sleeping potion and everyone but Claudius wakes up at the end…but I may be mixing this up with several adaptations of Romeo & Juliet (like the opera version by Georg Benda) where R&J survive.
When I am grocery shopping I wonder which aisle I would pick to defend in a fight to the death situation. Let me explain.
Say there are fifteen aisles, there are fifteen contestants and you can only defend yourself using items in your aisle. I would want the cooking supplies for the oil to grease the aisle entrances so no one can overwhelm me in a rush attack. Though today I realized that an arsenal of jars of spaghetti sauce and olive oil woul be pretty potent.
This game is even more fun at Home Depot.
Trying to make out the words to the song the furnace sings late at night when all else is still.
Daydreaming about what I would do if I won the lottery.
Daydreaming about how my yard will look when I finally get it landscaped. I know what I’ve wanted for a couple of years now and am saving up for it, but I still go off into la-la land thinking about it.