Daydreams

by Linda Robertson

A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish. –W.H. Auden

I admit, from time to time I like my images precooked with a side of 3-D glasses and buttered popcorn, but even when the movie theater has managed to reel me in, it’s over in a couple of hours and I’m back in the real world i.e. that place I like to escape from via reading, writing, daydreaming.

Speaking of the week’s topic, daydreaming...

Drifting blissfully off into the world of make believe is the purview of children everywhere. In my youth, it gave me the power to make a stick become a light saber. It transformed a fallen tree into a tauntaun. It turned a small block of wood into a tricorder. It converted a regular round pin-back button into a communicator. The woodland behind my childhood home—now my home, squee!—was, I was certain of this, home to a small tribe of jawas. I’d

seen them, almost perfectly camouflaged and at a distance, but I saw them.

Yeah. I was that kid. (If you don’t know what a tauntaun is or what jawas are…just shake your head and go away now.)

Add to that over-active imagination the brimming energy of a child, who is a climbing fiend. Now you have me. Some days it’s too cold/wet/snowy to go climb on top of the swing set and worry the neighbors with your antics.

What’s a kid to do?

Write stories then illustrate them.

Fast forward a couple of decades. I still climb a bit as necessary (on the counter to get to the high shelf or on ladders), but the jumping phase is over. The over-active imagination remains intact, and all twelve cylinders of that mental engine are pumping, baby.

But daydreaming grows up with the daydreamer. While my sci-fi geek status is not in doubt, my dirty-minded reputation may be questioned if I don’t at least address the adult fantasy aspect of daydreams and how that pertains to the books.

Which means, yes, (like all the other scenes in a book) the smut scenes are, in part, the product of my own private reveries. Not that I plan it that way or that I fantasize about my characters (that would be weird). I just contemplate the smut scene as it comes up, and I consider what the characters did last time and how, etc. Then I think up something that is 1.) different for them and 2.) which somehow shows advancement in their relationship. Sometimes it just works out that I can borrow from something I fantasized about, altering it according to how the characters’ unique personalities would transform it—usually this changes things a LOT.

And, as usual, I’ll give ya a rockin’ twist ending.

“These day dreams… what do they mean?

They keep haunting me. Are they warning me?”