February 21, 2002
I'm guessing that people's daydreams could give others a peek into their psyche. I'm kinda curious what a shrink would make of mine.
In high school, I had my own little sci-fi-ish reality where I stumbled upon some till-then unknown secret to meditation that gave me a couple abilities: I could see in a fight what my opponent would do next, and I had telekenesis. The fighting thing came in handy because I -- superhero that I was -- had kept a group of Bad Guys from doing something horrible at the high school. They kept coming back to get revenge, I kept getting better at beating them. Eventually the fantasy involved me beating six or seven people rather handily.
Then I went to college, and forgot about it for a couple years.
Then, when I started having troubles with ROTC, I started up my little adventures again. I had grown more powerful in the intervening years (and why not) but had kept things hidden from the people I was in college with, for fear of causing a panic if someone started flying around or flipping over cars with a thought.
I also had taught some high-school friends the meditation technique, but I'd lost contact with them. They'll come into play later, I promise. So, is this getting weird, or is this a normal thing to do?
Anyway, the story now adds a twist. I didn't want to teach anyone else, for the same reason I kept my abilities hidden. But I found that people's brains who have the ability are different from normal people, and when a bunch of my friends didn't show that change, I thought it would be safe to teach them.
One of them develops the change (apparently it's the effect, not the cause, of the abilities) and I'm exposed when I have to launch a friend out of the middle of the street to keep her from getting hit by a bus. Then I have to float myself over the ensuing trafic snarl to calm her down.
People, as I predicted, freak out. Some fundamentalist Christian decides I'm Satan-spawn and gets his mindless flock to try to do me in. I develop (discover?) I can also create a Star Trek-like shield around myself, create wormholes, and shoot ionized blasts of hydrogen (from water vapor in the air) at people. I'm usually content to just let bricks, stones and such ping off the shield (which I've imagined makes a neat visible ripple effect on the shield surface) but when they try to shoot me I zap them, to keep people from getting hit by stray bullets.
Gee, now my daydream has become combative. I know that ain't normal.
Now I usually just play out variations on that theme, sometimes calling in my friends who also have the ability for help (see, I told you they'd be back) when the fundies whip out things like surface-to-air missles on me. I've decided that my shield can take two impacts from stinger missles.
I also tend to imagine myself in the TV shows I watch. Saving the day, as always. But the people there don't flip out and try to kill me.
So now I have two daydreams. One, that takes place in the real world, in which I'm a freak of nature that people want to destroy. Another, that takes place in the worlds of Star Trek, Smallville, etc., some of them based in the real world, where I'm accepted and even welcomed.
Damn I'm weird.
