Morbid Imagination or Positive Vision?

Hello

Today has been cosy and informative, I have cradled my little baby all day long, holding her while she fights a cold - she's winning - something for which I am unimaginably GRATEFUL.

This is my eighth blog and its all about what I do with my idle mind. In the past I frequently suffered from something which a friend named for me one day - she called it the morbid imagination. For those of you fortunate enough to wonder to what I refer, the morbid imagination is a malignant feature of the mind from which some people suffer, it manifests itself when I am inactive, often in bed, or tired, or just feeling a bit low. My idling mind creates a wonderfully imaginative scene in which something usually rather dramatic occurs, it is called morbid because the imagining is always from a negative standpoint and will involve me undergoing some sort of traumatic event. Here is the example my lovely friend who named it for me gave when she was describing it:

I'm lying in bed, its early morning and my mind begins to wander......
I'm walking through a dark wood, the sky is grey and I have walked for hours, I'm tired. I slip and fall into a mine shaft. I am alone. My ankle is broken. Nobody knows I am in the woods. I need rescuing....

The vision is vivid, so vivid in fact that my emotional system gets involved and I experience all the attendants feelings that would be generated by this if it were an actual event. If that imagining is not bad enough on its own, I also found the vision once begun would entertain me; what would be the outcome? How would it unfold? How would the story end? I was unable, or unwilling to stop the show until it had run its course.

I am enormously grateful to that friend for the naming because it helped to break what had been a lifelong spell; an addiction to the morbid imagination. I started by just noticing that I was doing it, then I began to talk about it and found out its really not that unusual. My next step was to actively stop the vision once it had begun, or to divert it to a pleasant encounter, I found this hard at first but after a while it got easy.

It was a bad habit that I had entertained since childhood. I'm pretty sure it was partly fueled by poor screen choices, the world seems to be addicted to DRAMA! Movies and television are often dominated by bad-feeling interactions and events (disaster movies, black comedy, horror, soap operas to name a few). I am now very careful what I allow into my consciousness via the goggle-box.

I have a vivid imagination and a need to use it. I write stories and songs and when I'm not using my imagination actively and consciously it takes up a life of its own. My imagination needs direction.

I practice daily what I call positive visioning. Whenever I find myself in a situation where my mind is idle, and this could be anytime when I'm not enjoying and appreciating the beauty of the world, for example when I first wake in the morning, when I'm waiting for my kids to come out of school, when I'm walking in a city, or sat on a train at night, anywhere really, I use my imagination to envision something I would love to happen or come into being.

I go with this vision full throttle, I see my desire or dream in as much detail as possible, I feel what it is like to have that vision as a reality, I bask in it, I fully enjoy it as if it really is. I go on fantastic holidays, I swim in turquoise seas, I wander in the stunning beauty of the world, from my armchair! I live in the house of my dreams, I have my own art gallery and I'm a highly successful folk-musician of great renown, I'm a published author!
And YES, my current reality is such that this is all in my head, but it is all also in my heart, and I already feel how it would feel, (at least how I imagine it feels).
Every time I practice positive visioning I feel so joyful, so elated and so content that I'm no longer sure whether their coming into being could fulfill me anymore than just the imagining of them!
After all what is desire for, other than to feel the joy of what those fulfilled desires would bring?And if I fell the joy already??????

Ah, I hear you say, Why not sit in a hole all day and take a vow of silence like the chap in Monty Python's 'The Life of Brian'? Why not indeed? Actually I believe we are here to be creative, mind and body, and if life was just imagined we wouldn't need a physical body, or would we?

Anyway the point I'm trying to make is that happiness is INSIDE us, regardless of our environment or circumstances. We can use our imaginations to take us anywhere and be happy even on the darkest day. Choose to use your imagination to feel good every day.
The sun is out behind the clouds.

Today I am thankful for my wonderfully vivid imagination
I am thankful for the songs my heart sings
I am thankful for the smile on my face that floods my body with good feeling chemicals
I am thankful for my fingers and toes
I am thankful for my happy heart
I am thankful for wind in my hair when I run
I am thankful for the rain on my skin
I am thankful for the sun in my eyes
I am thankful for the mud between my toes
I am thankful for the sand in my picnic
I am thankful for your arms around me

love Klara