When Fiction Is Our Reality

What if…

We can go to the towns and places imagined in children’s books, where we feel safe, happy, and youthful? Can such places exist in brick and mortar – or only in our mind’s fantasy? Kids’ books take us to such wonderful places.

Just for a day you get to live out the fiction of your choosing – with no repercussions – where the world can blow up, you can travel to far off planets, you can be a superhero, you can kiss the person of your dreams? The next day you would wake up and the world and your life would be as it was prior to your 24-hour fantasy pass.

You could live in the 4^th century – or the 24^th - -and travel through time? It is possible in a book.

What if you could be one of a hundred other professions or live the life of a thousand different people? You can, with books.

You could alter history or create it? Yes, books are the tools for such things.

You could travel the world –or to other worlds? Space and time are mere constructs of your life in books.

You could fly, or play better than professional athletes, or win beauty contests? What if you could be ten times the person you have been or be the direct opposite of who you are? Anything is possible in the world of books.

We need fiction to help us co-exist with a deformed, insufficient, broken world. We need fiction to be our playground for immortality, immorality, and improbability. It can be a telescope or a microscope to us. It can be a playground for growing useful ideas or a landfill where we can neatly deposit the violent, insane, repressed and unformed sides of ourselves. Fiction is like a Las Vegas of the mind – what happens in fiction, stays in fiction.

Our fiction is becoming the recorded history of the future. Sometimes, fiction mirrors reality or creates it. Fiction plays an important role in not only compensating for life’s shortfalls, but to open us up to the possibilities of new lives to be lived. Novels can lure us to places we would never visit otherwise, including deep within our souls.

Oh, the world of books makes for a beautiful place. For now, we must settle for the life we choose to live but in our minds we can always escape to the best place of all – our fantasies!

Reading is a wonderful way to live.

Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person.