[image error] If I were to say that I have a great imagination, it would be like calling the sun a tad hot or duck lips slightly annoying and unattractive. I have an immense imagination that impacts my reality like a comet crushing the very life out of the Earth. Now please watch Deep Impact so you can fully appreciate that statement. Actually don't, that movie is terrible torture and more depressing than Contact (although Contact is actually worse because it has Jodie Foster in it). Only today did I realise how much my imagination affects my thinking.

Some people might think I am gullible, because I seem to believe everything. It's true that I often take things at face value, unless it really interests me. However, I don't really believe in anything. This is another problem, so I'll cover it later. For the focus of this blog, let's stick on the track of imagination and see where it takes us.

What happens when I hear some fantastic news is that my imagination switches on and suddenly wonders what would happen if it were true. As we all know, the brain works so fast that I am already deep in conspiracy theories, doomsday scenarios and several generations of character arcs before I even begin to question the validity of the news I've heard. This often causes me worry as my imagination becomes my reality. I then have to reason my way to a pleasant out come to be comfortable again, and usually only then do I think about whether it might be true or not.

Take today for example. I watched a TV show that shows lots of random, funny and weird videos and the stars discuss them. They showed some videos of UFOs and an alien in the backyard of some American family. Then they showed an article that said 3 huge UFOs were spotted on their way to Earth and would arrive here this year, probably in December. This had apparently been announced by SETI. Immediately I was thinking of what the aliens intentions might be. Would they be here to kill us or take us away? Were they friendly? I thought it more likely they want to enslave us or something because, since it coincided with the end of the Mayan calendar, so it could be what caused the Mayans to disappear and therefore the same was going to happen to us. It seems more likely that aliens would periodically take us away to their galaxy to be slaves after we had breed for a few thousand years than they just come back and kill us all every few thousand years. So then I imagined all the horrors that they could do to us, to torture us, kill us and beat us into submission. There are things that we could not possibly imagine, as the chances of any factor of their life being similar to ours is minute. So I was thinking I would rather kill myself than be taken away. Then I thought how horrible it would be to only have less than a year left and struggled with the unfairness of it all. I started discussing this with my girlfriend and we talked about all the motivations and outcomes we could think of for them and researched some Mayan history and conspiracy theories. Only then, after about an hour of musing and speculation, reasoning and reassuring did I think that maybe the report was bollocks. It just fit so nicely into the 2012 theories and the videos of UFOs were so interesting. I don't think I really believed it, I just got carried away.

Today, I realised that I do this a lot, and I thought of how many times in my life this has skewed my perceptions in milder and mundane experiences. I'm not crazy, I'm not stupid, I just walk down a different path guided by a big beast with a leash, or maybe it's a beautiful woman since I like following it so.