A girl and her stuffed dragon - story by me

Instructions

Says a girl: “It’s cold in here.” “Create a world.” Says a stuffed dragon in the girl’s voice. “Do I want to be in it?” says the girl. … “It’s cold in here,” was all I said at first, into the void. I’m aware that leaving the statement at that will likely not effectively convey all the ways I meant that phrase, but I don’t elaborate. I know I don’t have to with myself. ‘It’s cold in here.’ I didn’t just mean that it’s physically cold. I meant that my surroundings were cold and rigid, devoid of overt imaginative generation. But I knew that could change. It’s a dark, quiet room. I am alone on my bed. There is chirping and buzzing of outdoor critters creating inadvertent white noise to back my experience. ‘It’s cold in here.’ “Create a world.” A voice emerges from the quiet - my voice, imagined to be from the stuffed dragon in my hand, who looks up at me with beaded eyes suddenly full of projected life and emotion. ‘Create a world.’ It’s been a long time since I did that this way. There’s a pause as the dragon looks at me, and I can see it - the empathy in their eyes, the soft, gentle kindness in their demeanor. The way she seems to listen. What I provide myself in this imagining. For a second, I think of what that suggests about my subconscious desires. “You could do anything.” It - she - says in my voice. I pause. ‘Anything.’ I know it’s true. I could do anything. I could generate anything. I could become anything in my mind, do anything in my mind, create anything in my mind. Stories, places, moments. I could do it all in a blink. But I don’t. I could fall into the world of fantasy. It would be real inside my mind, but it wouldn’t be real outside it. I could spend more hours of my life “escaping” it. Why not be here? I could do something here. I’ve become comfortable being in my own rawness. I’ve dragged jagged edges I’d once buried - edges of my multifaceted mosaic self - out into the light of the conscious and have shown myself the beauty there can be in what is broken, the utility of blades, the distortions in my own reflections. I’ve healed myself in many ways. I’ve proven to myself that broken pieces can be rearranged into something functional, creative, resilient, safe. That the ways life ground me into sand - a desert of mistakes and pains, sand that slipped through the fingers of time, time and time again - did not make it any less possible for me to make glass of that abundance of sand beneath my feet that used to swallow me. To make pieces into something more clear. To become more transparent with myself. I didn’t used to think I could acquire what I now have. Self-compassion. Self-love. Learning I could do that was life-changing. And I am still aiming to change my life for the sake of my own well-being and my own health. For that, I could do anything. Just as I could in the land of imagination. I could imagine anything. I could create a world. “Do I want to be in it?” I say, meeting the invested gaze of the dragon. ‘I’m already in it,’ I realize. My metacognition excavating irony. But what I initially meant was: did I want to be in another fantasy? I’ve developed other ways to self-regulate, now. I no longer lean so heavily on that as I once did. In fact, I hardly lean on it at all. Do I want to do it this way? I thought I wanted to unlock my imaginings once more, to dive into the flow state of my imagination once more, to summon the generations of my hyperphantasia and create a new beginning. But I’ve taken more agency in my life of late. Less so in my imaginings, as I once did predominantly, and more so in my real life, as I once did scarcely. Do I want to be in a fantasy instead of a rabbit hole on something real? There is so much I could do right now. It’s amazing. And it awes me. It awed me so much that I wanted to capture this impression. That I wanted to write it down, and attempt to capture a glimmer of the profundity I perceived it to contain. A fragment of the impact it had on me. So that’s the overview of why I wrote this up. Note: My imagination still has utility even if I'm no longer using it as an escape.