Fantasy & Reality – My Grandkids & Me: A Continuing Story

I sat down and I was looking at a picture that Pia sent of Max and Mia in the backyard and it struck me that Max's reality and his imagination and even more so probably Mia's reality and imagination are joined together.

Whatever they're focused on,

Their reality of focusing becomes their imagination of what it is because they don't have the background and experience of having put things into their cubbyholes and categories.

And it's hard to imagine that except I have some memory of the experience of pillow fighting with myself and the pillow took on the character of the villain and there was this battle royale going on and in my mind it was all real.

It was the script that my mind was telling me that I was feeling or listening to.

As it was going on,

The pillow was reified into whatever it needed to be,

A flying carpet,

A villain,

Something to eat.

It was just all real.

And I remember wanting to go back when I was older into that imaginary sense of reality.

It's like trying to go back to the Venice restaurant on Union Turnpike near Lakeville Road and get the same flavor of pizza.

Or the Bellrose Bakery jelly donuts or ice cream or rolls or cake.

It's just not the same.

So going back to the picture of Max,

I'm looking at this picture of Max and me and Max is pulling weeds up.

He's near the fence in the backyard and he's got this big weed that he's pulling up halfway out of the ground.

And he's intently,

His expression is intently looking at it.

And I don't know exactly what he's doing.

If he was thinking he's pulling up weeds or maybe he's pulling up turnips to eat or maybe he's pulling up like a hole in the earth and he's going to be able to look down and see China on the other side.

I don't know what his reality of imagination was but I know he's wearing Spiderman gloves.

And Mia is standing there wearing these giant gloves that could be Pluto gloves or just giant garden gloves but you know they're bigger than she is.

And the thought struck me that there's a window where I stepped through when I was younger.

And once I was through the window,

I started having reflections.

You know I'd step through the window and I'm going to play pillow fight.

And I would step through that window and then I would get these reflections of mind and thought and body and sensation.

And it would start to flow into like a tunnel.

I was going down this tunnel of activity and the tunnel then opened up into a like body suit that I would put on of the character.

And once I had the body suit on of the character,

Then I started getting reflections of what that character would think like and how that character would be acting.

And I became the being of that particular character like Superman.

I was able to leap tall buildings and I would jump from one part of the room to the other.

But in my mind,

In that reified version of it,

I was leaping from one building to the other,

Saving the damsel from the dragon.

The toothpick became a sword.

It was that reification of shifting the imagination and reality merged together and could not be separated.

Almost like Alice in Wonderland when there was a little bottle that said,

Drink me.

You know,

Once she drank that,

Was the rest of it just in her mind or did she fall down the rabbit hole to begin with?

So how did she get there?

She just was walking and she fell down a rabbit hole.

So I was just walking along and all of a sudden I fell down this rabbit hole and I found myself in a room and I saw a window and I opened up the window and I went through it.

And I was now in a hall of mirrors and everything got reflected to me and at the end of the hall of mirrors there was this flowing,

You know,

Of just moving down to the end of the hall.

And when I got to the end,

There was like a movie set and it had all of these body suits of full length body suits exactly my size.

And I found one that was Superman and I put it on and as I put it on,

It kind of snapped in tightly against my skin but comfortably.

And it had a mask,

It had fingers and toes,

I mean it was a complete… I felt like Superman.

It was unmistakable and then I was able to leap and fly and my thoughts and my reality,

My imagination were all one.

It was all mingled together.

And once I was in that mindset of being Superman with the mindfulness of that,

Then I just became the being of Superman.

I was being Superman.

And then when I got to see that there was this damsel in distress,

The power came into me and I willfully jumped against the antagonist and I beat him to a pulp and I saved the damsel.

And there was these reflectives of good and character and wonderful and it was the principle that we used to have in the United States of all of those things.

And then that became the mindset that was there and the willful nature of doing that and it was reflected and I just flowed again down this kind of like river of time or doing.

And then the next thing I recall was the sense of well,

Maybe I'm really not Superman but I'm a kid and I can be like Superman so I need to technique.

Now what's the technique of flying?

How do you fly or how do you swim or how do you do whatever it is?

So then I became like a TED talk expert on technique of exactly the motions and the thinking and just how you do it.

And once I started doing the technique to that extent then it was like tracing.

I could see myself doing it and I was tracing along like tracing paper,

Outlining every movement that I had and I became the doing.

I became the flying.

I became the walking.

I became the swimming.

I became the meditating.

I became the thinking.

And it all became real.

It was so real that I lost that sense,

The difference again like when I was a kid.

I lost that difference between the imagination and reality.

The fantasy and the reality and it started merging together,

One getting absorbed and morphed into the other and if I leaned a little bit towards the reality,

I could feel I'm coming back into what's happening around me and the mindfulness.

And if I leaned the other way,

I became the being of that character and that became the mindfulness that I had.

So I became absorbed and interested in everything that was happening around me as the character that I was would change from Superman to Sherlock Holmes to an investigator to a scientist to a doctor to a cook to a meditator.

To whatever it was that was the next imaginary,

Willful shift of my attention and awareness.

But I was in a zone that was so reified,

The detail of everything started to expand.

The colors became brighter.

The line of division between one object that was sitting in front of another one,

That edge became much more detailed.

And then I realized that light reflects only off the surface of objects and there's a wealth of depth inside everything that I see that I guess at.

I'm assuming that it's there but I only see the surface.

It was like the kid that said the emperor didn't have clothes on.

He saw through the charade.

Now I know when I'm looking at a tree,

I see just the surface of the tree and I also know there's an inside of the tree.

A pretty good idea of what the inside of the tree looks like and it's very difficult for me to separate the knowing of what's on the inside from just what I see on the outside.

But I imagine for Max and Mia,

They're not aware of the inside of things.

They see it on the outside.

The surface,

Like when you go to a bookstore and they have a book cover that tries to entice you and there's a lot of words on the inside of the book.

But you know,

They're trying to give you an essence of what those words might be like and how you would benefit from reading all of the words in the book,

Probably thousands.

And you only see the surface and all we see of anything is the surface.

But yet we know pretty much what we think is behind the surface,

Behind the scenes.

And is that limiting?

Does that limit us because we think we know what's behind the scenes?

Would it be better just to see the surface?

Would it be better to have x-ray vision and we can see inside of what's there?

To have the perspective to see things from both sides,

From top and bottom and to unglue yourself from just the surface images or the recollection that you have of what the pizza tasted like.

To be searching for that same taste and in the meantime,

Not giving yourself the opportunity to thoroughly find out if the new taste might be even better.