Phantasia

There's this...projector inside my mind. I do not know where it came from, nor do I know how it works. It simply showed itself to me one day.

I have this thing I do in my mind. If I am bored, or performing some menial task, I can create lives, worlds, movies in my mind to entertain myself. While I have told myself I am wrong for doing this, that I am avoiding instead of engaging, retreating instead of living, inventing instead of actalizing, the truth is I have loved this about myself and have not shared it with anyone.

I have used this gift to change my life, to reimagine what I am living in the actual moment of living it, to experience it the way I would wish to experience it, not the way it is. Doing so took me out of the emotion, the hurt, and engaged my mind in a much more productive way.

One day, while out and about in the little town I lived in, a picture appeared on the inside of my forehead, the screen inside my mind, for the very first time. And I came to believe that was the day the projector showed up. I could not "see" it of course, and the screen was not always lit, but I knew it was there.

It came on that day and showed me a word. A seemingly random word, Alzheimer's, in yellow, written in large block letters. It only stayed for one, maybe two, seconds then disappeared. I thought nothing of it at the time, but not minutes later, I discovered the person I was looking at when it occurred did indeed have the disease.

So, the day the projector showed up, was also the day that I learned to shut up. Even the people you think are closest to you will look at you like you are insane, or from another planet, or lying, or stupid. Like the person I told.

Since then, the things that show up on that screen are unusual to be sure. Sometimes at night, when I close my eyes and start drifting off to sleep, a face will appear on that screen. It is always the same face, in black and white, and huge on that little screen inside my forehead. He is smiling but never speaks, there is nothing else I can see around him. When I try to focus on him, he goes away, or the projector shuts off.

It is like I know him though.

Other times, his face shows up and then images flash, all still in black and white of places, people that I cannot make out as they switch too fast for me to catch them, to hold on to them.

I would like to find the on/off switch. I would like to ask the projector to show me everything. I would like to know where it came from. If someone put it there, I would like to meet that person. If it is of my own creation, I would like to know what else I am capable of creating, inside this mind of mine.

It occurred to me that perhaps there are many other people like me. People who see things inside their minds and hide it. But remember, I have learned to shut up.

So, I focus instead on seeking, finding, on the discovery of where this projector goes when it is not brought to the screen and turned on.

I tried calling it to me. Closing my eyes and sitting for what seemed like hours, searching the nooks, crannies, and corners of my mind, shining a light in the shadows. It eluded me.

I became obsessed!

Like an addict, all I could think about was the next time I could sit and explore inside my head. I would rush home from work, I stopped seeing friends, family, or even being in contact with them. Nothing from the outside penetrated this place I had entered in my mind.

This went on for some time when I opened my eyes and took a look around me. I could have sworn that just the weekend had passed, yet, things were unfamiliar. I found myself sitting in a chair facing a window. The clothes I was wearing were not mine, I was not in my apartment.

I turned slowly to the room behind me. There was a bed, a dresser, a door to what I assumed was a bathroom. There was as a door with a little window with wired glass filling it.

I started to panic, just a little bit, when the projector turned on. Images flashed across the screen, my screen, showing me months of my life, what I had lived through while I was inside my own mind.

I saw friends and family who never understood me, I saw doctors and nurses who could find nothing "wrong" with me. I was fed, dressed, handled like a doll who could not handle herself.

I went to get up and go find someone, to tell them I was back from my explorations but the projector started showing more and more to me. Images flowed by so quickly but I was able to keep up and follow them to where they led this time.

I slowly sat back down in the chair, pulled the blanket up around my shoulders. Smiling, I followed the projector back, back, back into the place it had been hiding.

And it showed me everything.