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CONTEST ENDED – Thank you for submitting your stories!

#167: Mind Yourself

Do you sometimes feel like you spend a lot of your time in a fictional reality that has little to do with the real world? From cooking up imaginary scenarios about what we could, should, or would have said,’ to overthinking the smallest of incidents that happened years ago, our minds can make us feel incredibly powerful one minute, and equally helpless the next. These tricks our minds play can change our perceptions of both ourselves and the people around us.

This week’s prompts are inspired by the creativity of the mind — and the worlds we construct in our own heads (with both positive and negative consequences).

This week's prompts

Start your story with a daydream sequence, before snapping back to reality.

High School – 63 stories

Write a story about someone who overthinks every single thing, blowing the tiniest incidents out of proportion.

High School – 16 stories

Set your story inside a character’s mind, literally.

Fantasy – 58 stories

Write a story about someone who thinks their life is a romcom and they’re the protagonist.

High School – 15 stories

Write a story about a character who can’t tell what’s real and what’s not.

Horror – 80 stories

Stories

“FROM THE DIARY OF WORKER #6289” by Julia Corliss

Submitted to Contest #167

I have decided to write down here in my diary everything I can remember about what happened to me and how I came to live elsewhere. Today I found myself waking along a trail through a redwood forest that had somehow survived human mishandling of Mother Earth’s gifts. I stopped and stood before it in awe. I looked down to where the base of the tree united with the ground. I spied a door complete with a doorknob that had materialized and become visible. I stood before that massive redwood tree, and I knew it was a Patriarch tree. I reme...

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“Dream Worlds” by Dawn Kaltenbaugh

Submitted to Contest #167

Neurons fire, messages zooming from one synapse to another. Then the hour gets late, and the person whose skull I inhabit goes to sleep. This is my favorite part of the day, by far. Her life is boring from a brain’s point of view. She reads a book occasionally, but she’s no rocket scientist. Sometimes I wish we brains could have a convention and discuss our time off together. I bet some of the most banal citizens you meet have a fantastic dream life. They’d have to, or we brains would get bored, and no one ...

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“Dragonscape” by Anna Frayer

Submitted to Contest #167

Dren was blind, his nostrils filled with the acrid smell of burning wood. He tried to breath and fell to his knees coughing. When he caught his breath, he rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Slowly his eyesight cleared, but all he saw was a gray haze. Standing, he shuffled forward, boots scuffing across the hard ground. The smoke gradually began to clear, until he could make out shapes in the distance. He moved on, stumbling now and then over the uneven ground. The smoke continued to thin, and the sky took on a reddish cast. The sha...

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“JACOB'S BATTLE” by Melinda Madrigal

Submitted to Contest #167

Five years I spent in the Army. Five years of war has screwed with my mind. Five years of missing my family. Five years of constant never-ending danger. Five years of watching my brothers getting killed. Finally, all the pain of war is finally over. I'm finally home. I finally came home to my beautiful town of Lake Haven. This town is what the name means, a Haven for me, a place to wind down, go fishing, and hiking. There is no place like home. My home is right next to the lake and boy is it beautiful and on top of that I have the most b...

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“The Alter” by Marie White

Submitted to Contest #167

She awoke in a dungeon of her own creation. The physical manifestation of her mind: a semi-circular room offering dust-gray walls, ebony doors, black marble floors, and an ebony table and chairs. This was her first time seeing it—but not her first time trapped here. She had expected no better. Her surroundings represented a life fragmented by memory lapses, blank spots that she struggled to explain to puzzled coworker...

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“Together” by Willow Patte

Submitted to Contest #167

Content warning: this piece discusses themes of PTSD, medical trauma and anxiety.Hey, you, It’s been a while, hasn’t it? It feels like just yesterday we met. You were in pain as the demons from your past just kept refusing to be pushed down. I’m here to help, you see. I’m here to protect you. I’m truly sorry, but to protect you, I need to remind you what I am protecting you from. Those feelings when you smell something familiar, something that I was with you when you met me for the first time. I had to remind you that with a scent ...

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“Brilliant Corners” by Chipo Asante

Submitted to Contest #167

I almost don't recognise him, lying out on the scanner bed with his legs straight as a palm tree.The colour from his face has emptied out, leaving gaunt and ashen skin, like dust you would find building up on a windowsill. Before they shaved off his hair, it was a head of tangled weeds that, when its vines were stretched, reached his collarbone tattoo. It is now a blank canvas on which we place electrodes.I spent hours trying to put a name to the face before they handed me his chart. I scribbled out his name and promised that I would ask the...

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“The Lucid Bond” by Ryan Roarke

Submitted to Contest #167

Release the Bond, Student.I returned, snapping my eyes open as I gasped for breath. Wiping away a bead of sweat as it trailed down my forehead, I looked across the small room to Var-Lu. Sitting cross-legged atop a sheepskin rug, Var-Lu’s eyes remained closed, his face unreadable beneath the traditional white tattoos etched into his bronze skin.He opened his eyes and spoke softly. “Slow today. Again dream?” He had a basic grasp of Imperial Common, but the translation from Sul-Nari seemed to confine him, limiting his words to short sentences a...

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“Keep Time” by Laurie Rice

Submitted to Contest #167

Keep Time "Dlaczego wciąż robi to samo?" he said, lapsing into his native Polish in frustration. Anna Magdalena answered him in her most calm tone, "Frederic, you know she is practicing for the event with her co-workers. We have been through this before. You ...

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“Windsor's Operation” by Jonathan Passmore

Submitted to Contest #167

Disclaimer: this story includes topics of sexual violence and harm to self and others. Reader's discretion is advised. I’m often intrigued by the enigma of the infinitely connected series of two-dimensional polygons or three-dimensional polyhedrons known as fractals. More specifically, I find their regressive and progressive potential schema, which extends indefinitely towards both voids of human cognitive understanding in regard to the limits of absolute minimums and maximums, interesting in their limitations when representing a produc...

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“Between Now and Then” by Wendy Lathrop

Submitted to Contest #167

Ellen walked her champion Golden Retriever into a side room off the main convention center floor for a quiet place to brush Amber one more time before her next competition. “Amber” was short for the beauty’s official name of “Amber Star of Dreams”, which was on her pedigree and all her competition records. Her coat was thick and long, and Amber’s physical beauty was made even more entrancing by her easy-going nature and clear love of being the center of attention. In the show ring, Amber smiled and turned her head toward the judges in a...

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“Reading your dreams.” by Dayana Martinez

Submitted to Contest #167

Reading your dreams. After of coming to house was walking on the street, I felt very cheesy I don’t know truly why. My body was very weird in the morning up. I don’t know was colorful of my new favorite’s red lencery, or aunt´s boots gave me as a gift in August, may also be wintry weather, I kept to supermarket after look some ribbon that remind me to my mom, pulled out my list from my purse, I had Cortinas,...

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“Fantasies” by Nyxlan Marigold

Submitted to Contest #167

Have you ever had the idea that we might just be in a coma and what we know is just our imaginations trying to keep us from going brain dead? Or maybe you've thought that all the stars are like holes in a cup, and we are just small creatures roaming a fake land? Maybe it was that this world is the real hell and real life is better than this? Nobody can really say anything is real for sure, can they? Harper loves to get lost in books, spiraling down into her own imagination. Fictional, Realistic Fiction, Love stories, Novels, nursery rhymes,...

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“Thursday's Child Has Far to Go” by Carolina Mintz

Submitted to Contest #167

Bus number eight took Prudence downtown to work every day. She always sat in the same seat, second up from the back, the one with the stuck window. No one was ever sitting there when she boarded, and after a while she considered this to be her seat. She liked this seat because she could watch the people on the bus and on the sidewalk. On this particular day, a Thursday, it started to rain. She hadn’t noticed the dark clouds as she ran from her brownstone to catch the number eight on the corner and hadn’t brought an umbrella. Now, as the bu...

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“The Wordsmith” by Alex Aguilar

Submitted to Contest #167

“You look a little sad. Everything good?” I asked as I was walking out of the lecture hall. “Mhm!” Aspen nodded, her characteristic smile coming back after having disappeared throughout the entire class. “Just stressed.” “Oh,” I said, more to myself than to her. I looked up and met her gaze. A quick question flashed in and out of my mind, though I already knew the answer. We’re finally alone. Is this the universe giving me my chance? The hallway was empty. Everyone had gone. It was just me and her waiting for the hands on the clock to sig...

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$250

Prize money

232

Contest entries

96

Stories

Ended on 23:59 - Oct 14, 2022 EST

Won by Lucy Joyce 🏆

Title: Adelaide's Cemetery

Submissions must be between 1,000 - 3,000 words and will be approved and published on Reedsy Prompts within 7 days of the contest closing.

Read the full terms & conditions or check out the FAQ if you have any questions!

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