Whose story is it anyway?

Writing stories which used to come so facilely to me at one time, seems to be an arduous task these days. I’ve thought long and hard about it and wondered why. I now realise that writing a story is not as simple as just imagining up characters and a plot-line. You have to imagine yourself as the characters. Inhabit their bodies, minds and hearts. Experience that and write about that.

Sometimes, or often times, the ‘I’ that has inhabited me does not permit the eviction of itself from me to inhabit another personality. That is when my stories get stuck. When I try to write as a spectator, looking in from outside and trying to guess what they are thinking and feeling, it doesn’t work. It comes out contrived, like a fabrication, like a paper flower, colourful, yet false and lacking reality. So I wait for the time when I am allowed to switch, inhabit my characters again and write their lives.

But then the question arises. If I can inhabit a different world and experience a different life, all in my imagination, then could the life I am currently experiencing be an imagined one too? Is there some seer, some watcher who conjures up this life like a dream, a dream from which I can awaken and find myself in a different reality? Is that what is called self-realisation? To awaken from the dream of this illusionary world and know reality.

We already know that people whose brains are wired differently from us so called ‘normal’ people, experience a different reality. So then, which is the actual reality if reality is subjective and differs from person to person? Shouldn’t we be wanting to find out, instead of being content to be stuck in a world of shifting illusions, living out our lives in a dream-state?