flexagon | Childhood daydreams, for your amusement

For some reason last night I caught myself thinking about some old
daydreams... and I'm not talking about that Chad Allen kid I used to
have a crush on. I named my daydreams. They were separate worlds I
could go to, and I would stay in them for a long time every day just
imagining things. Sarah and I used to list them. I think I had a list
about 15 long.

Hog Heaven always
makes me laugh, in retrospect. This consisted of, basically, a cubic
mile of food that I would find in my back yard or somewhere nearby.
Yep. One cubic mile. This is important. It was made of 1-foot-thick
layers of food; for example, the first 12 inches in, in any direction,
was made of Sausage McMuffins with Egg. Every time you took one you
got to decide whether it magically filled back in, or whether it would
be permanently gone, and in this way you could tunnel through the food
to make rooms and passages to live in. (You'd think this would get
messy, but pretty much everything I remember daydreaming up always
came in packages or little units of some kind). You'd think I would
have tried to think of something really exquisite to go in that
central cubic food of food, but I don't think I ever did. And no,
nothing ever got hot or cold, or sagged, or went bad, and nobody ever
died of cholesterol poisoning.

Biggle Balls is the only other one I remember the name of. Ever see
those plastic toys that let you build columns to drop marbles through
-- and some of the pieces formed ramps from one column to another,
that the marbles would roll along? Some of those ramp pieces were
straight, some were squiggled, and so forth. Well, in Biggle Balls
there were a lot of systems like that, and they were the sole course
of study in school. As you got more advanced the balls got smaller,
and you had more complicated kits with lots and lots of crazy pieces
(sometimes possibly invisible pieces). I never did get any of those
marble-rolling toys in real life, but they would have disappointed me
compared to what I thought sixth-graders would be playing with -- I
mean working with -- in Biggle Balls.

I had a whole trampoline-land in which there was basically no ground,
just disembodied trampolines floating in the air. Nobody was ever
afraid of falling because anyone could make trampolines appear and
disappear underneath them just by thinking about it. When tired one
could sleep in a cloud (these were dry and warm clouds, of course,
like cotton. They might have also provided food and water, I'm not
sure).

I had some kind of garden behind the house that went way beyond money
trees, into trees that had gems as well as paper money. I think
maybe this was based on a book I once had where a kid has a
money tree seed, and it's very realistically portrayed in that he has
to water it and it's kind of hard to take care of. Did any plants of
mine grow coins or did I not bother? I'm not sure, but I went into
great detail thinking up these plants and their various stages of
development. There were, of course, never any spiders. And I bought
plenty of things with the harvested money.

I also had one I spent a lot of time in whose name escapes me
completely. We can call it Rainbow Land. Everything here came in the
seven colors of the rainbow, and everything I had was green -- white
and green roller skates and so forth. There were other kids in this
one who would play with me -- they had other colors. Also, there were
crazy sports; one was kind of like skating, but each skate had
basically one big ball bearing under the fall of each foot. People
used these to glide down long, looping tracks like thin waterslides
(and somehow this was safe). Also, there were sheets of plastic like
flexible skateboards that both feet attached to and that basically had
the air resistance of something much larger, enabling the wearer to
glide, swoop and do loops. I don't remember how this worked but there
was a lot of this swooping done from somewhere high up, down to a
lake. I mentioned other kids, but of course I was the best at all
these things.

Um, and I just remembered one that I think is even older, about an
infinite stationery / office supply store. I think I still have
versions of that one, but my memories of the huge supplies of cute
pencils and erasers make me think I was rather young at the time.

Unbelievable... I feel faintly nostalgic. Someone slap me!