My Prison Dream

OK. So I had a dream the other night that I felt sorry for all the people in prison. All of them. All at once. And I thought it was awful unfair that they were stuck inside, with no decent views, nothing to look at. I thought that that must be very depressing.

So I made a wee picture book for them. But this wasn't an ordinary picture book. Each double-page spread had a picture of a lovely scene...like a beach, or a mountain, or a glen, or a desert, or a fairy castle etc etc. And if you just opened the book and looked at the scene, it was lovely. Very nice etc.

But if you took out the pair of magic viewing spectacles tucked away in the spine of the book, and put them on, then you would jump right into the picture, and be there, all alone. You could walk about in the magic world...touch the grass, smell the breeze...but you were only there in your head...

So in my dream I felt that all the prisoners could still be in prison, but with my magic book, they could jump into their own special world, for a kind of retreat.

But in my dream the government disagreed with me. And they said that prisoners are in prison for punishment. And that my book was an escape route. So they banned it.

Boo. Hiss.

Now, as far as I know, prisoners don't get Internet access. So no gmail. Or skype. Or Second Life. They're cut off from the real world, but also from the Virtual World. So it makes sense that the government wouldn't let them access my little book dream world.

But this got me thinking. What if I committed a crime and got locked up in prison. I'd be both without the freedom of my real world, with trees and flowers and beaches and surfing and friends and drinking and sunshine and puddles and stars and little new-born nephews and larger, much noisier neices...

But I'd also be without my virtual world. Facebook. Gmail. Skype. Second Life. BBC News. Blogger. Business card sets on flickr. Stitch and Bitch inspiration from Karen. Scrabulous...

And I'm wondering, which would I miss most???