If I had the power…

I’m going to put The Thursday Ten on hiatus for a while. It’s turned into another exercise in building YouTube playlists, and I’m already doing a list of ten songs on Mondays and a list of five on Friday, not to mention two songs on Tuesdays and two or three for “Battle of the Bands” twice a month. It’ll still be an occasional feature, and who knows, maybe a regular feature again some time in the future.

Meanwhile, I’ve been neglecting Mama Kat’s Pretty-Much World-Famous Writer’s Workshop, partly because I haven’t been able to get into the prompts (I’m receiving them, just not finding any I can work into a story) and partly because I’m busy building playlists. Among today’s prompts, there’s this one:

Write a blog post inspired by the word: power

My brother took his son, who was about six, to see the “Masters of the Universe” movie. I guess every other six-year-old boy and his father in town were there, too. He said, at the point where He-Man makes this declaration, every kid in the theater was standing on his chair, yelling “I HAVE THE POWER!” along with He-Man, and all the fathers just looked at each other rolling their eyes.

I’ve never looked for any kind of power, at least not over other human beings. The only person I want to have power over is me. (Is I? Hate to get my grammar wrong.) There are powers I’d like to have, of course. Here’s a nowhere-near-exhaustive list:

• Time travel
• Control over my entire mind, like Brian Finch (Jake McDorman) from “Limitless“
• Clairvoyance
• The power to be physically present in my dreams (if there’s a word for it, I don’t know what it is)

Time travel might be the most useful power to have. I can imagine being able to go back in time to when my father first got sick with the cancer that took his life and bring him forward in time to where they had a cure for it. From everything I’ve heard and read, he died of a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. They now have treatments that can treat it, even throw it into remission. Or to take my mother back to where her cancer started and catch it before it was too late to save her. Or maybe start again, knowing what I know now. I think everyone would like to be able to do that.

The one that would be really cool to have is the ability to physically enter my dream world. I have really cool dreams. Maybe it’s the bupropion at bedtime. I really should learn to write them down when I wake up. I meet interesting people and visit interesting places. Sometimes I can even feel physical contact in my dreams. Best part is the rules of space and time don’t apply there. It’s the closest I come to time travel.

Wishful thinking? Of course it is. That might be the greatest power of all.