Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Nothing special, just The Rock

I daydream all the time.  While walking, while riding the subway, and especially while in a car.  My daydreams are pretty variable, as most people's are, but they really trend towards superhero type fantasies.

Sometimes I am just like Spider Man, superhumanly strong and fast, but not truly world bending.  I dream about fighting villains and saving innocents, about incredible adventure.

But other times I am more like Superman.  I am never so bland and dull as him though, my powers are bizarre and intricate.  Not all of the fantasy is about outrageous adventures against supervillains, because sometimes with world changing powers I take on real problems.  A ridiculous superhero of that power level can change governments, stop wars, and really remake the world.  What world leader could avoid at least nominally respecting someone who could simply flatten their home at will, with absolutely nothing that could be done to stop it?  The neat thing about this is often I try to figure out how I will cope with my loved ones being threatened once my super identity becomes known.  I am not silly enough to think that a tiny bit of cloth over my eyes will prevent facial recognition software, or just good old fashioned people's eyes, from figuring out who I was before I became super.  A superhero with nothing to lose and no attachments is far more dangerous than one who doesn't want certain specific people to be hurt.

Over the past year though my power trip fantasies have changed in tone.  I am still bigger than myself and have adventures I would avoid in real life, but instead of Superman I am just The Rock.  The Rock can't change the world, he can't intimidate world leaders, and he isn't invincible.  He could randomly pick someone up, hold them over his head, and then throw them through a window though and that is the sort of fantasy I have been having this past year.

This new style of daydream wouldn't require magic to make a reality, it would just need endless weightlifting, tons of steroids, and eating tremendous amounts of cod.  Just like The Rock!

Given that for the past year I have been working out a ton and getting a lot stronger we have a ready made explanation for why my daydreams and fantasies have suddenly shifted, but I wish I understood it better.  Being bigger and stronger has changed the way I feel around other people, and I have definitely noticed other people reacting to it.  I wish I could tell how much of it is physical change in my body and how much is the way I act.  Before I started all that though I certainly didn't expect it to change where my mind goes when I am just drifting, but it certainly seems to have done that.

Maybe it is that when I was smaller I felt like I wasn't "a big scary dude", the sort of person who could actually win a serious physical confrontation, and that I leapt right to magic for my fantasy fix.  Now I am closer to the The Rock template, perhaps I don't feel like being physically powerful is that far away, and I only need to reach a small distance.

I don't know, really.

But it is kind of neat to see how my unconscious perception of myself and what sorts of fantasies I come up with change with working out and getting big.  And it isn't as though I am suddenly gigantic - it is only a 7% change in body mass, give or take.  Yet that change has been enough to substantially alter the way I think in this way.

And all of that is kind of absurd no matter what because I still don't know the first thing about fighting and have no desire to do it in the first place.  That fact just doesn't seem to matter much to my brain when I am daydreaming though.

Brains are weird.

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