I had Conan the Barbarian in my car, in exactly this same way. (He kept saying, “Huh. Magic.”)
Periwinkle and pool, many people explain life to some famous dead person. For some reason, a lot of people explain stuff to Mozart.
Me, I often try to explain modern life to King Henry the Eighth of England. He’s kind of closed minded, ridiculously spoilt, and a know-it-all, and I really have to do my best to impress him with some modern achievement. Sometimes I succeed. I think that all started when I saw the TV series The Tudors. Who doesn’t want to talk to Johnathan Rhys-Myers?
I do some pretending on curvy twisty roads when I’m scooting or driving a car. I don’t drive unsafely, or over the speed limit (maybe just a tiny bit), but I like to pretend I’m on race track and leaving my competition in the dust. Pretty immature for my age, eh?
I do this often too.
When I was losing weight a year and a half ago, I pretended that I was a street kid pickpocket, like an Artful Dodger type, and that I was very good at being hungry. It helped get me to a place where I was used to being hungry.
I, too, bring historical figures on tour with me while I run errands.
I will often invite long dead historical mentors of mine to sit in on my bow making sessions and critique my work as I build my bows. I argue with them, accept compliments from them, we discuss theory. Just like old friends and peers might do. I don’t have any delusions about them being real but it doesn’t stop me from enjoying their company.
(Walks into the thread, stops abruptly, blinks, slowly turns on a big and hopefully reassuring and calming smile, waves weakly, slowwwwly backs out again…)
When I’m working out (too rarely these days) and I feel like I just can’t do ANY MORE, I present myself with the hypothetical of being offered a million dollars to do just one more minute, or whatever. Turns out I could, in fact, go a little further for a million dollars.
I also do the “company’s coming” trick for cleaning.
See? You’re playing the game too! Right on, bro’!
Being an adult means that you get to decide for yourself what being an adult means.
You know half of them are silently and sinuously stalking you now, don’t you?
One of my ongoing internal monologues is having to explain modern day science and tech things to a fictional character from a universe where magic is real (yet has some internally consistent rules) in a way that kind of back-engineers the technology to work via equivalent magical principles. Despite the fact that I could, in theory, change the magical principles at will, I like to keep the integrity of the exercise going and will be honest with myself if I am doing a poor job with a particular thing. Or congratulate myself if I do it particularly well.
I also like to map out witness protection plans for myself, whenever I’m in a new place I like to imagine being plunked down in that town or neighborhood, and having to immediately assume a house and a place to work and routines. What kind of job would someone who lived in that house over there have? Would I shop at that random grocery store, or that other one?
Whenever any even moderately significant historical event occurs, I imagine explaining it to Mark Twain, who for some reason has just arrived from the past and needs me to fill him in.
I love this kind of “I may be grown up but I’m still a kid” attitude.
By the way, those paddle shifters that my VW has behind the bars of the steering wheel…that’s how I fire the port and starboard machine guns, and if the traffic is particularly annoying, they control the missile launchers.
I put a white thumb-tack on my dashboard, so it reflects in my windshield, directly in front of me, as a “heads up display” aiming point for my machine guns and missiles.
Don’t most people spend about half their mental energies imaging what would happen if life suddenly turned into an action movie?
My evidence:
JcWoman, you have a keeper! My hubby can get pretty goofy as well, and I have to say, his ability to make me laugh is what has helped us through an awful lot of awful days.
Pool: You may actually be my hero. I totally have a “little” streak, preferring ice cream to breakfast food, seriously getting giddy over goofy things like home made slime, and swearing that chicken nuggets are supposed to be shaped like dinosaurs or they’re not really chicken nuggets. I am also perpetually late … for like…everything. I’m stealing your crayons and using the bomb in the house thing. I might actually get to work on time!
Our brains are able to successfully navigate many tasks without our consciousness being involved. That might sound strange, but if you’ve ever completed a series of routine tasks - taking a shower, driving to work, sweeping a floor - and suddenly, you’re done, almost unexpectedly. It’s as if you’re on auto-pilot.
If this were not the case, we would be constantly overwhelmed by sensory input.
When consciousness is not required, sometimes it just starts doodling, to amuse itself. This is “imagination”. People who have “active” imaginations are often very creative, are more socially aware, are better problem-solvers, and are more artistic. The down-side is that they’re more prone to fantasy - more likely to “believe” in things - religious things, supernatural things.
It’s speculated that abnormal functioning of this mechanism is what causes (some kinds of) delusions, fantasies which blur from the imagination backwards into reality.
The general rule of thumb here is: If it’s a positive part of your life, enjoy it. If it’s a negative part of your life, seek help. If it’s a negative part of someone else’s life, seek help quickly or help will be sought out on your behalf. And, that’s never a happy day for anyone.
For example, if you stop up the plug hole on your bathtub, turn on the shower, and pretend to be in a submarine that’s been hit… Well, there’s nothing inherently wrong there. It might even (safely) put you in the right frame of mind if you’re writing a book about someone in that position or if you’re writing music about someone struggling against the odds or it might be a safe, relatively healthy relief of stress if you’re experiencing a lot of frustration in life, generally.
But, the same fantasy, combined with some screaming, or a loss of distinction between reality and fantasy… Well, that could go badly pretty quickly. If you escalate into genuine panic, you need help.
This is one of the most fun and upbeat SD threads I’ve read in a while.
I signed in to come here and post a comment because no one has mentioned my most common pretense:
Every single time I clean out a cat box, I imagine I’m an archaeologist doing an excavation. I have to sift the “dirt” in a methodical way (by quadrant, in rows or columns or diagonals) so as not to miss anything. Every shake of the scoop could reveal some wonderful artifact. So far, I’ve never encountered anything but the expected contents of a cat box. But pretending that I might at any moment uncover an arrowhead or 18th-century pottery shard or ancient Greek loom weight makes the task more interesting.
Owlett: That is super way magno cool!
Me, personally, every once in a long while – maybe twice a year – I would actually hide something, like an old earring, in the catbox, so I could “find” it.
(I hide $5 bills here and there in my home, and sometimes stumble on them, having forgotten having hidden them. It’s so much fun!)
DrForrester: Agreed… When it stops being fun, when it actually gets in the way of life, then it’s time to re-evaluate. It’s like the classic symptom of obsessive/compulsive disorder, hand-washing. If washing your hands, say, four times a day feels good…well, okay, no harm. But if you have to wash thirty times a day…or if you feel huge anxiety from missing one of the four times…then the deal has gone sour.
“Role playing” in real life, as a private and imagined thing, is fun…so long as you aren’t in actual stress and fear because of the imaginary bomb counting down in the house which is hastening you in morning preparations.
We’re hoping to maximize enjoyment here, and real panic is not at all enjoyable.
(I sometimes watch the microwave oven’s timer counting down. What if those seventeen seconds were all I had left in life? 14… What will it be like to be dead? 9… All the good things I never did come back to haunt me. 5… Will I see all my friends and family who have passed away? Beep.beep.beep…
Then I just drink my tea.)