The Storyteller

This is kind of a hybrid between 'role of procrastination' and 'doing nothing'.  It's short, so please point out any places that could use expansion.  Also, any help with transitions would be great.

I'm sitting in front of my computer, wondering what to write for the day. I have deadlines approaching, and not enough initiative. So I get up and grab myself some ice cream while I think for a bit. I've always enjoyed telling myself stories. They may involve me or other real people, sometimes not. Oftentimes not actually. My parents always told me that I had a great imagination.

But for all the stories I've made up over the past seventeen years, I find it hard to find ones that are objectively true. Even the games I played in elementary and middle school took place half in my head, making things up as I went along, drawing from a deep well of books, movies, and games, and reacting to what crazy imaginations my friends brought to the game. Looking back, I’m surprised I didn’t join some tabletop RPG community.

However, coming to Uni changed things for how I used my imagination during the day. First was that the Uni yard is smaller than the areas for recess at previous schools I had been at. Second was the installation of a computer in my daily life (pun intended). This opened a door to entirely new forms of entertainment. Suddenly, my imagination was not being used as much since the settings and the characters were largely dictated by the creator of the game. Still, I wasn’t on my computer all the time, and I still got sent off to bed before I was really tired. So I would tell myself stories to pass the time between when my parents told me to go to bed and when I fell asleep. In these hours, my imagination is just as free as it had been when younger, though back then, it was active at other times as well.

As I got access to greater and greater computing power, I could play more sophisticated games that had their own stories with rich settings and open-ended characters that I could use and expand on in my stories. So while having a computer constantly with me resulted in a less open-ended use of my imagination during the day, it gave me fodder to use at night. This is not to say that my imagination was completely shut off during the day. It was now focused towards game theory, conceiving of devious strategies and evaluating my performance. You know, practical things. Things that I could turn around and apply and experiment with as soon as I had free time with my computer.

So now, my imagination is used for ‘practical’ uses during the day, but can still spread it’s wings and fly in unexpected directions at night. At night, as you fall asleep, the barrier between your practical mind that gets you through the day and the mind that makes your dreams blurs, and it’s fun and sometimes even profound what things you can discover by simply exploring the vast expanses that are your imagination.