I love dreaming! :D

Since school days, I have been asked about my favourite hobbies. It always used to be reading, I remember. I used to be engrossed in books, lost in a faraway land, oblivious to the real world around me, hunger, sleep and other such attention-seekers ignored. It was more often than not that my mom would find me sitting in one place, in one attitude for hours at stretch, irritable if disturbed. Books were my drugs and I was badly hooked. To the words, the ideas, the world they painted. I couldn’t get enough.  I'd stay up complete nights, with a torch in hand under my blanket, and solve mysteries with Fatty, Beth and all their friends, or go to school with Darrell, Gwendoline and all of their friends, or visit the Faraway Tree with all it's inhabitants. My birthday gifts were novels and even when not my birthday, most of my purchases were novels. Fiction, non fiction, romance, thriller, mystery- you name it and I’d tried it.

Then I came to college and started watching a lot of movies, TV series and the like. For the first year and a half, I’ve nearly watched a movie and/or more than an episode of some TV series, every day. I also read books, but the number of books had dwindled for a while. People said this was to be expected on moving out of home, since freedom, unlimited quick internet and certain stages of adolescence do that to people. But suddenly, these getaways seemed to be things I had to be warned against, things I had to be stopped from doing. I got confused, as the feeling movies evoked in me was quite similar in some ways to the one evoked by books previously. And no one really had a problem with the books, at least not as much as with the TV series.

Upon pondering a bit, I figured movies and books both sold a dream, a life I wasn’t living but could be living. They both meant that I could have no problems of mine to worry about in the time I was engrossed in them. I realized what we all (or maybe it’s just me) look for is escape. Escape, for the world is indeed meaningless. Life indeed has no purpose. We just exist in the realm we think exists. And sometimes, for most of us, one realm isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to be one person, with one person’s life, relations and problems. I want to live all the lives I’m not living, an explorer, a detective, a doctor, a vagabond, even a criminal or an adulteress. I like to feel what the characters in my books and movies feel. More often than not, I end up crying at both, but I love that I can. I can feel and understand and imagine someone so well, because sometimes, just sometimes, that reality is more real and dear to me than my supposed 'real' reality.

Dreaming is my favourite pass-time, my favourite hobby and while I may have various methods of doing it, the end result is always the same. Escape. Call me a coward if you will, escapist is not what all want to be. But problems become easier to solve when not personal, when viewed from a distance and dreaming is the way in which my life itself becomes less personal to me. So I plan on dreaming away the nights in unconscious images conjured by my mind's slumber-induced creativity, and dreaming away days in planning (im)possible futures, beautiful events, and happy endings.