EMPEROR THE DRAGON: What’s this?

You may have been told that daydreaming is pointless. You may have been told to cut it out, especially if you’ve had trouble keeping your mind on the task at hand. Okay, but let me just say that when you’re trying to rebuild your self, daydreaming is the task at hand. Not just daydreaming, but stragic, therapeutic daydreaming.

If you have ADHD, you’re probably a pretty skilled daydreamer. Good for you. You need a healthy imagination to design an Emotional Safe Place. 

An Emotional Safe Place (ESP for short) is an extremely personalized, very private mental refuge—perhaps the most strategic, therapeutic daydream of them all. You are its architect; you create it in your mind’s eye. It’s a place where time stands still, where you feel safe, comfortable, protected and free to be alive.

If you seek peace, it’s the most peaceful place imaginable. If you crave stimulation, your Emotional Safe Place is exciting, and then some. Either way, it’s 100% safe and 100% private. You don’t have to earn it or deserve it or work for it or surrender it to the authorities. It belongs to you and you alone. It’s unconditional. It is what it is and it isn’t what it isn’t. You will go there whenever you need a break, a strategy or a vacation. When you’re out of ideas, you’ll go to your Emotional Safe Place to regroup.

I constructed my own Emotional Safe Place nearly thirty years ago. There’s the cloud room, where I go to float in the clouds. There’s the wardrobe room, where I can change into different outfits and become different characters. The living room has a 180-degree panoramic window and the house rotates so I can see the beach or the mountains or the rainforest or my acre of crape myrtles in full bloom. (Naturally, they’re always in full bloom.) Outside my house is a vast landscape, fully described in my book, Focused Forward. Along with much more about strategic, therapeutic daydreaming.

Now, about that 45-foot-long purple dragon. She lives in my Emotional Safe Place. Her name is Emperor. Whenever I feel like it, I climb onto her back, between her purple scales, and ride her through my excellent, ever-changing domain. 

Imagine that!