Do you ever have one of those days where you just cannot think?

You read the same sentence over and over, but it just doesn’t compute. You walk into a room only to forget why you went there. You sit through an entire lecture or conversation only to realize it’s over and you don’t know what happened.

That was me this past week. My brain was zombified mush.

I felt like Dory, the little fish in Finding Nemo who has short-term memory loss:

Marlin: I’m miles from home with a fish who can’t even remember her name.
Dory: Boy, I bet that’s frustrating.

 

For instance, I picked up a book at the library yesterday– How Pleasure Works: the New Science of Why We Like What We Like by Paul Bloom.  However, I could not remember why I’d put the book on hold.

Sometimes I think my brain just needs to reboot every now and then.

Luckily there was something sparkly in the book to get my attention–chapter six.

Imagination.

You gotta love it, whether it’s daydreaming or spending time in worlds created by other people’s imaginations, it can offer our tired minds a chance to start over.

According to the author, “Imagination is Reality Lite — a useful substitute when the real pleasure is inaccessible, too risky, or too much work.”

Why not?  In an instant we can get caught up in a romance with a vampire, sing along with a high school glee club or run around virtual worlds shooting aliens.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses of gray matter. . .or something like that.

Books, TV, movies and video games allow us to tag along on the journey.  We experience the story.

 “We enjoy imaginative experiences because at some level we don’t distinguish them from real ones.”

In fact the best ones are the stories that we get so engrossed in that we forget for the moment that they aren’t real.

And the fact that we can cry or laugh at a story, simply because our brains recognizes the emotion?  Well, it shows how powerful those mushy brains can turn out to be.

Imagine what we can accomplish when we simply put our minds on it.

“Imagination is everything.

It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.”

–Albert Einstein

 

What stories are you imagining for your life?