Melbourne mind meltdown

Posted by amanda
July 25, 2008

I was looking forward to exploring Melbourne last week to refresh my mind with a few new sights and sounds. And my Melbourne trip definitely had this effect, but surprisingly almost a little too much. I can’t imagine now how my brain used to survive when I was travelling for months at a time through places far more exotic than Melbourne, because all the stimuli on this trip were enough to almost cause my mind to meltdown: I was so full of new impressions and ideas.

While I was there (in fact mostly on the plane ride over) I read the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, one I’ve been looking forward to ever since I saw my friend Zitka reading the Czech version, because although I couldn’t understand it I was fascinated by the diagrams and Zitka’s descriptions of the story. The narrator is a 15-year-old boy who has Asperger’s Syndrome and thus sees the world a little differently to others - and one point he makes beautifully is that he sees everything. He describes this beautifully by comparing what other people might see if they were in the countryside:

  1. I am standing in a field that is full of grass.
  2. There are some cows in the fields. … etc

… to what he sees:

  1. There are 19 cows in the field, 15 of which are black and white and 4 of which are brown and white.
  2. There is a village in the distance which has 31 visible hours and a church with a square tower and not a spire … etc

This incredibly keen observation is not quite how I felt in Melbourne but it was certainly in this direction. Perhaps because I had writing in my head, I planned to be inspired and I was looking for travel stories as well, and my brain was trying to soak up as much as possible. It’s quite a nice feeling, actually. But I hope I’m able to capture all those ideas and inspirations and get them into words and stories and good fiction.

Inspiration for Writers

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