Inspiration or over-active imagination?

Sights? Sounds? Scents? What triggers your dream-state? What tickles your muse? We've all heard the expression, "a picture's worth a thousand words".  Do pictures send your mind reeling, make your palms itch to jot down the story before it escapes?

Consider these ruins atop the Rock of Cashel in Ireland. After I snapped this shot, I lowered the camera and though I stood among several other tourists, I was all alone.  My mind whirled through the ruins, searched over the landscape like a bloodhound led by a scent.  Hubby had to touch my shoulder to break my reverie because I wasn't there.  I was watching ghosts of the past fit together chiseled stones and build walls without mortar.

Or what about this woman playing the harp along the path winding up the Cliffs of Moher? My mind painted her as a trapped soul, unable to communicate in any other way than the magical sound released by her instrument.  Perhaps she waited for a hero?  A hero to break the curse and release her from the prison of silence.

 Did this gentleman ride his pony to the town square each day waiting for a lost love who promised she'd someday return? 






You see? I'm hopeless.  Ever the dreamer, I never know when it will hit.  And it doesn't take far away places to send me into my own little world.



 

The sight of my granddaughter singing her heart out at the Christmas play triggered visions of a self-assured young woman waiting in the future.













Her serious admonition while singing this song showed me the headstrong side to the young lady coming in the years ahead.






 

And then there's the little wood imp, hiding in the forest among the trees just itching to whisk away a passerbye and sweep them through the gateway into the land of Fae.

Sights? Sounds? Scents?  What sends YOU into a dream?