It was a Sabbath afternoon. God, how I hated the Sabbath. We were Seventh-Day Adventists at Avondale College in Cooranbong (comes from the Aboriginal word “Kour-an-bong”, meaning “rocky bottom creek”) and you weren’t allowed to do anything fun on the Sabbath.
I was seven years old. It was late 1973. I hadn’t started school yet but I knew how to read.
So after church, we came home for lunch and my parents’ had guests over, adult guests, and after lunch, there was nothing for me to do and nowhere for me to go. For some reason, I had to stay home and stay in. It was summer. The days were long and the Sabbath wouldn’t end until after sundown, which was ages.
So I sat in the big comfortable chair in the living room as the adults did their thing around me, they were probably cleaning up and heading out for a nature walk, and I gathered myself in the chair, and imagined I was somewhere else, anywhere else, having an adventure. And as I drifted into that scene, something out of Coral Island/Treasure Island/Huck Finn, I imagined that my best friend Wayne and I were provisioning stores at the Sanitarium Health Food Factory for our big rafting trip down Dora Creek.
Then I saw us gathering everything on board the raft and pushing away from the shore, away from the adults, and heading downstream to have adventures with abos.
As I disappeared into my reverie, I found that all of my boredom and unhappiness and lack of ease disappeared and I felt alive and happy and the hero of my own story. My mom was thrilled that I could entertain myself and not be a bother. Such a good boy. And I was off surfing the waves of fantasy, letting go of my problems and getting high on my dreams, transforming my state with a blink of my mind’s eye and elevating to a better world where I was an admirable guy doing great things and operating at the peak of my powers.
Getting lost in my dreams became my favorite hobby. Later, I’d follow sports, chase girls, watch movies, and work and exercise to the extreme — all to ward off the pain of my failure to attach normally. As the years rolled by, my distractions became addictions.
