Some days are lucid and clear. My brain is quiet and I can function. Some days, however, I feel like there are too many conversations in my head and I can't keep them separate from reality. I remember instances of sheer lunacy - when I worked as a word processor for a law firm in NYC, and the keyboard keys were having conversations about how unfair it was that one was being utilized more than the other - and my fingers were taking sides! I kept on making mistakes because this key wanted to be used as equally as the other key.

Other instances: I make calls at work, and one day, for some reason, I was living a Dr Who episode - every move I made was in conjunction (in my head, anyway) to something the Doctor needed or the TARDIS required. I had to mentally shake that off (and it was hard) and make a definite, focused effort on staying in reality. Or, somehow, I'm not REALLY where I'm at - work, or walking, or home, or bed - those aren't real. Whatever schema my mind is working with at the moment (depends on what I'm reading or currently obsessed with) becomes the only reality and everything else I do just plays into it.

That Dr Who day, for example; I had finished watching the second season of the new series. I was truly breathing, eating, dreaming, thinking, talking and living Dr. Who. I could not make the separation between that and reality. Or recently, reading the Kushiel Saga; completely unable for a while to see that I WASN'T LIVING IN THAT BOOK. Because, in my head, I was.

I was reading a Michael Stackpole series; suddenly, everything was part of the story. Or LOST; I began seeing things and hearing things that I related directly to the show. Heroes, SG1, Steven Brust, Anne McCaffrey. I do this all the time. I have been doing this all my life. It scares me, that I can leave 'reality' so easily behind, and everything I perceive belongs in the fantasy world I begin to inhabit.

It's a form of disassociation, perhaps, or something schizophrenic. I stopped writing real stories when I realized that I was fully expecting them to be real, for something to happen as it was happening to my protagonist. I thought, today, that it was over, but then I got home and found I was living out yet another little fantasy thing based on the books I was reading. It's scary, and it makes me wonder if anyone else does that.

Nevertheless, it is also fun - and familiar. I am the heroine in my fantasies, even if the line between my mental landscape and the real world gets really indistinct.

Now I'm off to bed, to inhabit the worlds within my head, and enjoy myself. I'll wake up tomorrow eager for a new day, but also saddened at leaving the infinitely richer world I escape to every night. But I don't miss it too much; the lingering effects are with me all the time and I have to make a distinct effort to stay on target within the real world.