Daydreaming

     My astigmatism hasn't improved, and I wonder if I might be listing toward being cross-eyed. My husband doesn't think my eyes are crossed, but then I reminded him of the actress, Anne Bancroft, who dazzled Mel Brooks with her circus-performing eyes.
     "She didn't look like she was x-eyed," I said.
     "No. But she was trained by the method acting school," he retorted.
     "What?!" I sputtered.

     I possess more than one creative streak. Therefore I daydream. Tossed into the mix is that I am a writer.  Here too, I daydream a lot––a heck of a lot. When I was found daydreaming as a youngster, I would be snapped out of it by one of two admonitions: 1) you're going to grow up to be lazy; or, 2) you're going to ruin your eyes and become cross-eyed. What's a  young, creative, believe-in-everything-adults-say-daydreamer to do?
     Here's what I did: I set out to test the boundaries of those threats for the rest of my life. I was not going to let saber-rattling trap or restrict my creative pulses. I daydreamed with wide-open, unblinking, dry eyes. I explored associations in my mind. I invented possibilities on the fly. I witnessed fictitious scenes, characters, and dialogue––and all while daydreaming with wide-open eyes. Gore Vidal said, "Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head." I'm sure Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford could add their own take on the matter. Humans are a daydreaming species. Humans should not waste their daydreaming time.
     Eventually, I take my daydreams to paper giving them guidance and hoping to stitch the varied "takes" together into a whole as they ought to be.

Today, my glasses are thick, the astigmatism isn't good, but I trust my husband when he tells me I'm not (yet) cross-eyed. It can't get any better than that.