Current Music: Some James Brown song that my boss is whistling.
Current Thought: Work is good. Pay is good. Food is good.
Okay, so I've got this idea... This morning, through a series of twisted links in various people's weblogs, I stumbled upon the site of a person with Dissociative Identity Disorder. (Or at least, that's what the person would have you believe-- some of what she wrote was so surreal that I suspected it might be fiction.) The individual wrote about her "alters," or other personalities, and the process of coping with them.
So I started doing a little research, and slowly a plot formed in my mind. What if this character, probably a woman, has DID? And what if, gradually, one at a time, her alters start appearing as real people? You know, she sees Fern, a little old matronly woman, behind the counter at a used bookstore or something, or she runs into Astrid, a five-year-old girl, at a park, or Doyle, a teenage goth-punk boy, in a dance club. And finally, towards the end of the story, she meets Isaac, who's been her imaginary best friend since she was too young to talk.
And here's the kicker-- she recognizes all these people, people she's had with her for most of her life, but they, of course, don't recognize her. But she introduces herself, makes friends with them, and as she does, they cease to visit her in her mind. By meeting the real people, she is cured of her alters. It'd be kinda like A Beautiful Mind without all the math. Now, I've yet to decide if I should add a cruel twist at the end, that these "real" people are just the next stage in the main character's sickness, and they're still figments of her imagination, like Parcher, Charles and Marcy to John Nash. That would be incredibly depressing, and a bit too much of a ripoff for my tastes. I think I'll just make it a happy ending. Now I just have to figure out how to do that without making it sappy.
Whew. Anyway. That's my creativity-spurt for the afternoon. I go to ponder now. Namarie.
