Longing for Fictionland - How do you deal with it?

Is lucid dreaming a real thing? And is it as realistic-seeming as the people who espouse it make it sound?

"Religion isn't the cause of wars, it's the excuse." —Mycroft Next

Depends on the person, but I've heard accounts that it is a very real thing :)

x5 I don't think I've ever wanted that. Granted, it's probably in part due to how I don't judge characters based on how I'd like it if they were real. And anyway, some characters, despite being interesting, I wouldn't wish to be real. For example, I can't really want Optimus Prime to exist and come to earth, because that would mean the earth is under huge threat. I wouldn't want Cthulhu or Nyarlathotep to be real either because, well...

Okay, maybe I should use characters that don't come from stories where mankind is under huge threat. I think some characters I'd probably find annoying if I had to actually deal with them. Better leave them in the box (or flatscreen or whatever) where I can observe them, but they can't bother me.

@Carci: Yeah, that inspiration thing is what I was trying to get at with my Ultraman example.

edited 5th Nov '12 1:33:37 PM by SimplyWhatever

whatever

I highly doubt anything will ever convert me. Unless there is a god who is willing to show up in my life time.

@And as for lucid dreaming. I just found out about it. Apparently most people don't dream like that. Every dream I ever had(or at least every dream I remember) has been lucid dreams till about a week ago. For two nights in a row I had, I guess normal, dreams. They scared the shit out of me when I woke up. I couldn't tell a dream was a dream. Shook me badly.

edited 5th Nov '12 1:17:21 PM by InfalliableLiar

Stop caring and embrace nullness.

I get the feeling my predicament is more uncommon than I thought. As a person in general I'm more emotional than average, sometimes to my detriment. Sometimes I get unreasonably angry or unreasonably sad (usually the latter) over things that are non-issues to most people.

"Religion isn't the cause of wars, it's the excuse." —Mycroft Next

Well, whenever you think reality isn't awesome, watch this video :P

Please don't take this as an attempt to proselytize; but speaking as a theist, I don't really think of God as some sort of magical Reality Warper who can do amazing stuff by snapping his fingers. Like most atheists, not only I have no reason to believe that such a being exists, but I would simply have no reason to want to bow to it if it existed. Power alone is not even close to enough to buy my worship; and even benevolence, in itself, could gain only my respect and nothing more.

I won't go into my personal understanding of God here, because, well, that's not the topic; but speaking of "coolness", I think that humans definitely have the advantage over an hypothetical Reality Warper. What we obtain, we obtain through determination and effort. Our achiements are cool, because they require struggle. Because we, as a species, earned them. That what amounts to a feral praire chimp managed to set foot on the Moon is awesome; and it is awesome precisely because we did that all by ourselves. A Dr Manhattan teleporting Armstrong and company to Mars would have been way less cool.

edited 5th Nov '12 1:40:28 PM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Carciofus, that's one of the coolest things I've read in quite some time.

(That One Guy, I can't watch the video right now but I'll get around to it. I opened it on mute and saw a man in a wheelchair about to roll down a huge slide and already I can't wait to get home.)

edited 5th Nov '12 1:49:12 PM by EddieValiantJr

"Religion isn't the cause of wars, it's the excuse." —Mycroft Next

You've met him. There is plenty more where that came from.

I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.

I meant it as kind of a joke on the whole subject in general, but yeah :P it's kinda cool.

One can try to make life more like fiction. Personally though I rather waste my time, like, in the Internet, until the feeling passes.

"Atheism is the religion whose followers are easiest to troll"

I write about it.

The end result... well, jeez, I don't think I need to bother elaborating if you know anything about me en generale.

edited 5th Nov '12 2:57:40 PM by Tre

oh, that's why I need this binary mind // ⌘

I have a real life friend who expressed this sentiment to me once - that real life would never be as cool as the books she read.

I don't really know what to do about it, because I encouraged her to go and find some adventure in the real world but she won't.

Be not afraid...

Oh, and it just came to me — the fiction is more interesting than life almost by definition, pretty much. Even if it is plain ole' all-too-mundane slice-of-life drama, it has to be written interestingly enough to make anyone read it at all.

"Atheism is the religion whose followers are easiest to troll"

Well, there is a thing called "too much of a good thing". I'm pretty sure that any interesting thing becomes boring when it becomes common/routine. A wizard from Dn D will probably find our lives in real life as interesting as we find his in fantasy. Hell, if we somehow managed to pick any person from merely 30 years ago and bring him/her to the present, s/he will find our lives interesting at first, particularly the stuff that s/he does not have in her own time period.

Hence why people travel I suppose. Anything that is outside of your habit is interesting pretty much.

Not to mention that most fiction people fawn over is not slice-of-life. It's easy to lead a cool life if you're, like, a magical princess, or a farmhand destined to defeat the local Evil Overlord, instead of being a farmhand whole your life. And at the same time people tend to disregard that the farmhand usually loses his family in the process.

"Atheism is the religion whose followers are easiest to troll"

I would believe that fighting and defeating an Evil Overlord routinely (like once per week) would make that a boring task too. Much like how the police find catching and arresting criminals to be far less interesting than most of us imagine.

"You must cross the Meteoric Mountains to the Plains of Banes, and thereby delve into the Catacombs of Peril to seize the Ruby of Dwarven Might to show to the Great Dragon Sage Ardaxar."
"Again?!"

You are dazzled by my array of very legal documents.

Re. OP: By deliberately turning myself into the kind of person I liked to read about.

It seemed the only way.

'All he needs is for somebody to throw handgrenades at him for the rest of his life...'

How do I cope? I go outside and get some fresh air. That clears me up.

Of course, don't you know anything about ALCHEMY?!- Twin clones of Ivan the Great

Ew, outside.

The sun is too bright and scary, so no.

Why do people keep talking about outside like it's so great?

There are drop bears outside!

Also burning sky orbs.

And snakes.

You are dazzled by my array of very legal documents.

And rain and sleet and hail and biting cold wind.

Join us in our quest to play all RPG video games! Moving on to disc 2 of Grandia!

The people who long for fiction to be reality are clearly looking at one side of the coin. Sure, it can be way better than reality, but it can also be a fuckton worse.