Mind Control

We finished watching 7 Pounds yesterday and I felt like maybe my husband was going to die soon. My heart beat fast and my arms needed to hold him right away. So I did and said, "Don't die, ok?" He laughed at my dramatics, and I knew I was being silly, but it's amazing the power movies and books can have to control your thinking.

Yet, I love how I feel after I read a book in which the characters become my friends I come to know them so well or watch a movie/TV show that draws me in so much it makes me scream, jump, gasp, or cry; it's like I just woke up from a powerful dream. The remnants of the characters pains or joys still cling to me as the lights go up or the book is closed.

I can't shake Prison Break off me after watching an hour or two the night before. The next day as I'm walking around town I wonder, "What will Scoffield do now that he is in prison in Panama? Oh! I bet he will discover Sarah is dead and be mad at Lincoln..." I ponder sometimes why Im trying to figure it out so much, it's just a TV show, not even reality. But it feels as though the characters are acquaintances I know of, but don't really know, and I want to figure out their lives for them.

Or recently after I finished reading The Secret Life of Bees (a wonderful book by the way) I felt as though I was back in the South, my lips all day were savoring a ripened peach from an orchard in South Carolina. I wondered if the next Thai person would start speaking in a Southern accent and wanted to find August so I could become her apprentice and learn from her about bees and life.

How do stories do that? They stick onto us and, if we allow it, their themes can transform the way we view life. Oh the power words or pictures can have on a person to steal part of their subconscious away and control it for as long as the viewer allows. Writers are the hypnotists of their audiences.

I hope I can use my hypnotizing powers to help others escape the harsh world for a bit and to help plant seeds of hope in minds searching for it.

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
-Lord Byron