I like to daydream. I have a bunch of different daydreams, and they function sort of like a screen saver for my brain. If I’m not doing anything mentally taxing, I turn on one and tune the world out. I can still remember as a child imagining all my stuffed animals as a council, sitting in a circle and doing something. Most involve a faceless, nameless protagonist who has some sort of magical powers. There are almost never meaningful relationships, and never names, in these daydreams. It’s kinda creeps me out, what this fact says about me. These daydreams are very similar to what I experience when reading a book, in form if not content. These stories always involve some sort of enemy that needs defeating. Most run several years, until I get bored of them. I use them to help fall asleep.
Hey, I have those too! I always assumed it was a natural outgrowth of normal kid fantasies (being a magical hero and facing evil, no meaningful relationships) that for some reason I just never gave up on. As I’ve gotten older I’ve noticed certain tendencies in the way my protagonist acts and relates to others that have given me insight into myself, and I’ve stopped using them as a sleep aid because sometimes the adventure was interesting enough that I would deliberately stay awake so I could keep generating the next part.
Oftentimes, if I need to fall asleep I’ll pick a really peaceful one. When I was younger, I had one where I was a full sized person in a world made entirely of legos, including tiny living lego people. I’d fall asleep, dreaming of building secret tunnels under the ocean, vast cities with towers a mile high, train tracks for the lego people that climbed mountains that rose above breathable atmosphere to reach secret veins of special legos. It was only during the day that floods, earthquakes and rival lego people threatened.
On a related note, I have such awesome ideas for a Minecraft mod.
There’s a thread running through Methods of Rationality on the implications of patterning your developmental schema on the coming-of-age narrative typical of epic fantasy. (Haven’t been able to isolate any specific examples there, but similar topics come up in “Formative Youth”.) I’m pretty sure that sort of thing is very common among members of our particular tribe, and it’s a topic that I’d love to see explored in more detail; unfortunately, no one I know of has ever approached it in depth, let alone with much rigor.
Might just be another holdover from the EEA, come to that; it’s a lot easier to be a hero and save your social world when your social world consists of fifty-odd people, all of whom you know and maybe half a dozen of whom share your particular skillset. But hither lies a Just-So story.
patterning your developmental schema on the coming-of-age narrative typical of epic fantasy.
I don’t think I do that, there was never any doubt in my mind that it was just a story (eg. at several points over the years I’ve gotten bored of ‘me’ but not of the universe I’ve spent hours creating, and started following another character instead. Or introduced long timeskips so I don’t have to narrate boring but necessary-to-my-current-plot events).
I’d say that if anything, I absorbed less from all the fantasy and sci fi tropes I read as a kid and teenager than most people. It never occurred to me as a kid that I should be modelling any part of my behaviour after the people in books.
Hey, I have those too! I always assumed it was a natural outgrowth of normal kid fantasies (being a magical hero and facing evil, no meaningful relationships) that for some reason I just never gave up on. As I’ve gotten older I’ve noticed certain tendencies in the way my protagonist acts and relates to others that have given me insight into myself, and I’ve stopped using them as a sleep aid because sometimes the adventure was interesting enough that I would deliberately stay awake so I could keep generating the next part.
Oftentimes, if I need to fall asleep I’ll pick a really peaceful one. When I was younger, I had one where I was a full sized person in a world made entirely of legos, including tiny living lego people. I’d fall asleep, dreaming of building secret tunnels under the ocean, vast cities with towers a mile high, train tracks for the lego people that climbed mountains that rose above breathable atmosphere to reach secret veins of special legos. It was only during the day that floods, earthquakes and rival lego people threatened.
On a related note, I have such awesome ideas for a Minecraft mod.
This makes me think that a website where people anonymously describe their fantasies/daydreams would be really interesting.
There’s a thread running through Methods of Rationality on the implications of patterning your developmental schema on the coming-of-age narrative typical of epic fantasy. (Haven’t been able to isolate any specific examples there, but similar topics come up in “Formative Youth”.) I’m pretty sure that sort of thing is very common among members of our particular tribe, and it’s a topic that I’d love to see explored in more detail; unfortunately, no one I know of has ever approached it in depth, let alone with much rigor.
Might just be another holdover from the EEA, come to that; it’s a lot easier to be a hero and save your social world when your social world consists of fifty-odd people, all of whom you know and maybe half a dozen of whom share your particular skillset. But hither lies a Just-So story.
I don’t think I do that, there was never any doubt in my mind that it was just a story (eg. at several points over the years I’ve gotten bored of ‘me’ but not of the universe I’ve spent hours creating, and started following another character instead. Or introduced long timeskips so I don’t have to narrate boring but necessary-to-my-current-plot events).
I’d say that if anything, I absorbed less from all the fantasy and sci fi tropes I read as a kid and teenager than most people. It never occurred to me as a kid that I should be modelling any part of my behaviour after the people in books.