Andrey D. (ILE) about fantasies

As a child, I could play for hours, mostly with toy soldiers. I would stage different battles, and again, I made up stories with sequels, telling them to my mom because my dad couldn’t listen for long—he would just laugh at me. I imagined huge, fantastical stories with continuations, and a lot of what I invented back then later found its way into my creative work.

<...> When I was little, I was constantly imagining things. About everything. I would invent sort of movies with me in them.

I would steal scenes from all the films I watched, from all the action movies. From all the fairy tales, from all the books. If I saw a picture in a book, say, of a soldier, I would imagine that this is the soldier, I am his commander, and that we are fighting someone together. I would steal characters from cartoons as well—there always had to be heroes, and villains, and I was always one of the heroes. All of this was in front of my eyes.

Even now, when I write something, I see all of it, I visualize it, I imagine it. I absolutely have to act it all out—even to the point that I have a few toy guns lying around at home. And if I’m writing an action story—I’ve written several novellas and novels—and there’s some shooting in it, I have to spin the gun in my hands to better picture it. I know how it must look from the outside: a grown young man holding a toy gun, but still. Or, for example, if I’m walking somewhere with my mom, I have a wooden ruler in my hand, and I imagine it’s a sword. I walk along, swish, swish... I see the sword.

Moreover, I had this monstrous ability to move across different times and eras: sometimes I was an ancient Russian knight, sometimes somewhere in the future with a laser gun. I would go so deeply into these fantasies… The more my classmates and even my own father pressured me, the deeper I would dive.

The same applied to trips to other cities. I imagined traveling all over the world and dreamed of going to London one day. For example, I would read a fifth-grade English textbook, which had information about London, and London would come alive in my imagination.