speculations on why i love reading
[I put my current read down to write this reflection on reading.]
There is a specific immersive feeling that I get when I read that is wholly unique and that I seem unable to access any other way. Not the kind of total immersion where I dissociate from reality. Rather, the action of reading firmly anchors me within time itself; I become more aware of each second passing and my presence in that timespace. It's unlike other forms of mediatic immersion (shows, movies, video games) where I lose myself in another world entirely. I wonder if it's because of the materiality, textural quality of books, where reading a book entails holding it in my hands, flipping the pages one by one, and looking at the words printed on them intently to glimpse meaning beyond the page. I'm both present to the book's physicality and the book's projection into another imagined world.
And entering this imagined world appears to me like recalling a memory that I never had; the image is tainted by the same blurriness. This touched me particularly because I'm an extremely nostalgic person and spend most of my days daydreaming (which was an issue in my childhood because I would tend to spend more time in my head than in my body). When coming back to a space I occupied before, with various people who may or may not still be part of my life and as a younger version of myself, I get almost dizzy feeling the timespaces of the past and the now existing at once in my mind.
This happened recently, when I took a walk in Laurier Park, and could see myself lying in the grass with my ex last June, and me sitting with a newly made friend on a bench facing the outdoor pool, and so on. Is daydreaming contagious?