The Paranormal

I just finished reading a book called Three. In this book, the main character is being plagued by a demon from the past. In the end it turns out that he had two alter egos, one is good and one is evil. In a sense he created his own reality. I believe that we all do this. The question is why? I am an avid reader and have been most of my life. When I’m reading a book I’ve always described it as escaping reality, but until now I have not fully understood the truth in those words. To some people reading is a waste of time, to others it is an adventure yadda yadda yadda…
When I was about 13 years old the second Lord of the Rings movie came out. I never watched the first movie because I have never been able to handle anything even remotely scary (I realize now it’s because I believed it was real) but there was a lot of peer pressure since it was so popular. I never intended to watch the second one but my brother’s friends brought it to our house one night to watch. We lived in a rather small house and they had the volume turned way up, so it was almost impossible to avoid watching with out looking like a baby. I watched bits and pieces of it until I started to get interested. That was a BIG mistake. Later I remember waking up in the middle of the night thinking The Orcs are coming to get me! I have to get away; I have to get out of here! I was frantic until I calmed myself to think about it and realized it wasn’t real.
Thinking back on my childhood I was weird. When I played pretend it was real (to me at least). I made up scenarios for myself and characters. I was either the victim of some evil plot or the one charged to rescue the victims destined to always fail. I only played these scenes out by myself and only in my head. When I was with other people I usually pretended to be a princess or my favorite animal the dog. Once I was alone pretend was more real. One time I convinced myself that my parents were divorced or that they beat me so I ran away. Of course it was completely ridiculous, and my parents are happily married without a trace of abuse anywhere. I would pretend that I was crippled and no one liked me, when in truth it was the opposite. Why did I do these things? Why did I dwell on evil so much?
Do we all have demons that plague us? Are we battling ourselves, each other, spirits, or nothing? I am now 16 years old and I still find myself having difficulty differentiating between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy. What is real and what is made up? I think that many if not all people do strange things like this, but most people don’t think about it or choose not to remember certain things. The human mind is so amazing that we can’t even begin to understand it. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not some crazy psychopath with multiple alter egos. I am in fact quite normal compared to many peoples’ standards as far as the mind is concerned. However I do have a lot of time to contemplate these things and I enjoy it. Now does that make me weird? Probably, but then you have to ask yourself who defines what is “weird”?