Personal Blogs

Are some people more prone to these than others?  As an only child, and one that very much relished isolation, I had a very vivid mental world.  I dispute the fact that it was an imaginary one.  If I played a board game with me playing all the players, I didn't actually think I was sitting with other people.  I used to enjoy the mental stimulation of maintaining separate characters within my head, knowing that in theory each of them did not know of their opponents position, but I knew all of them.  I remained entirely honest to this at all times.  There was no fantasy involved.  I was fully aware I was playing a game with myself.  The other players didn't have personalities, and I didn't talk to them or any such nonsense.  I just needed to have them in order for a game such as monopoly to make sense.  I was also a massive daydreamer and retreated to my mental world whenever anything became too much.  Funnily enough, having tried not to mentally disappear from people mid-conversation for most of my adult life, I'm now being actively encouraged to do so by my cognitive restructuring woman.  Only now it's not called daydreaming; it's called distraction techniques.  Uh-huh.

Some memories, on the other hand, do appear to be entirely false, and I just can't work it out.  I was reminded of one a few days ago.  My bank manager phoned me up.  Given the fact that my last, and indeed only prior correspondence with this woman was a letter I posted to her when drunk, I was a little nervous about what I might have said.  It was initially an awkward conversation, as I tried to discretely establish what the letter had said.  It seems it was nothing too bad, just a conversational piece about my financial emotions.  And the fact that I would like to buy some shares in someone's wine cellar.  Good one Rosie.  This got me thinking about a long-held false memory, of my granddad's wine cellar.  Or supposedly false.  I refuse to fully accept it as false, but there it is.  When I was little I used to spend time alone with my granddad, and we used to look through his coin collection in an underground wine cellar.  Yes we did!  It was lined from floor to ceiling in bottles of dusty wine, all in the old wooden crates.  There were hundreds and hundreds of bottles.  On one side of the room there was a small tunnel, shaped like a tiny door, that even as a small child I had to crawl through.  At the end of the tunnel, which was pitch black, there was a perfectly round room.  The tunnel always sounded 'drippy' and the walls were all damp.  My granddad told me that a dragon lived in the round room, but it very rarely showed itself to people.  I always used to rush down there to see if I could see the dragon, and I never did.  My granddad put a red light bulb in the little round room, which only served to increase my belief in the existence of the dragon for whatever reason.  He died when I was young, I think about seven, but I was taken there weekly for a long time, and we regularly went to this place.  Only I could go in the dragon room because adults were too big to crawl down the tunnel.  Which does of course beg the question of how the red light bulb got to be in there.  The difficulty is, is that there is no wine cellar, no underground tunnel, no little round room, and of course, no dragon.  I have searched the house, and although there are many secret passageways and hiding places, and tiny little corridors within the house itself, I cannot find any way of getting underground.  No one else in my family has any knowledge of it.  The farm house was sadly sold a few years ago, so I cannot undertake any further investigation.  It's one of those very strange things where I just can't make sense of how the situation might have occurred. 

I had an allergic reaction to something yesterday and my head and top half of my body went bright red, and very very hot.  Consequently I felt ill all night, and was awake for most of it, running my head under the cold tap.  Even the slope of my pillow made me feel dizzy and sick.  I never used to be allergic to anything, so it's a bit strange.  I'm starting to feel ok now but I can still feel my brain tingling, which is an odd sensation.  Hopefully that will also stop soon.

I am fast running out of time to write my assignment.  I am determined to start it today, even if just to head the first page.  Well, reasonably determined!