Dementia and E-books

[Timoleon]

Hi All ---

I'm wondering if I'm losing it, at the tender young age of 53, and if any of you have ever had a similar weird reading experience (I've never heard of this before!). It's happened a couple of times in the last month --- maybe I'm overtired from work or something.

Anyway... I'll be reading in bed at night and I begin to get sleepy. But the e-book is good, so I just keep on reading. Eventually I realize that I've been looking at the same page for a long time. It doesn't seem that way --- the story has been progressing nicely --- but when I start reading the page again I'm flabbergasted to discover that the plot on the screen has little to do with the story that has happily been playing out in my mind!

It's as if I'm reading and drift off into a hypnagogic stupor, but the movie keeps playing! At some point my mind separated from the written word and started spinning its own tale

For instance: I was reading a space opera, I think something by Robert Reed, and the action involved some shenanigans aboard the mother ship. In my whacked-out, home-grown story, the protagonist suits up and goes outside the vessel to do whatever, and it continues more or less plausibly from there. But on the written page, no one ever goes outside the ship or even talks about doing so.

It's as if my mind, in it's hypnagogic stupor, or nascent dementia, has turned on the quantum dot and gone down the road to a different reality.

Should I call the guys with the white coats, or is this something not too divorced from what has happened to others?

[vivaldirules]

Yes, it's a quantum dot. Call the white coat guys.

No, what you do is what I assume that most people do. In my case, I'm so self-centered that the story in my head quickly involves me and degenerates to something so far from either reality or the story that when I look back at the page and realize what has happened, I have no problem distinguishing my head games from the story. You're just clearly less self-centered than me and you're demonstrating what reading is all about - getting involved in the story. Authors would probably love to hear from readers like you.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Don't look at me... I just fall asleep while my eyes keep scanning the same paragraph...