How Reading Fantasy Rewired My Creative Mind

There was a period in my life when I only read books about performance. Finance. Productivity. Self-growth. Optimization. Every page felt like another instruction manual for becoming “better,” faster, sharper.

And for a while, it worked.

I designed quickly. Efficiently. Rationally.

But something inside me was becoming mechanical.

A few years ago, someone told me something that completely changed the way I see creativity:“Self-help trains the mind to execute. Fantasy trains the mind to imagine.”

As an autistic person, that sentence stayed with me deeply.So I began reading differently.

Fantasy. Romance. Fiction. Stories that had no agenda other than making you feel, dream, wander, and see.

At first, it felt almost unproductive.Then something extraordinary happened.

My mind softened.

I began imagining every page like a film unfolding in my head. Forests. Ancient cities. Quiet oceans. Candlelit rooms. Strange worlds suspended between reality and dreams. My nights became calmer. I created a special nighttime ritual around reading, and for the first time in years, my brain felt nourished instead of overstimulated.

Then the dreams started becoming vivid.

Not ordinary dreams — cinematic ones. Spaces I had never visited before. Materials, atmospheres, lighting conditions, landscapes, emotional sensations. Places that felt almost unreal. Interestingly, many resembled the surreal imagery we now see generated through AI, except I had already been dreaming this way years ago.

And the strangest part is how real they feel.

Sometimes I visit entire places in my dreams — cities, homes, landscapes — and I remember them with detail, almost as if I had physically traveled there. Sometimes people speak languages I do not consciously know, yet inside the dream I understand them perfectly.

There are nights when I wake up simply to drink water, then return to bed and continue the exact same dream, as if my mind had paused a film and pressed play again.

That ability still fascinates me.

And without realizing it, my design process transformed completely.

Today, I design faster than ever before — but differently.Not from pressure. From vision.

I can picture entire environments in my mind before sketching them. I can feel the atmosphere of a space before it exists. Reading fiction trained something that technical books never could: emotional imagination.

Fantasy literature expanded my internal world, and in return, my external work became richer.

More human. More layered. More alive.

But beyond design, it changed the way I move through life itself.

Stories teach resilience in a softer way. They remind you that darkness always coexists with beauty. That every difficult chapter eventually turns its page. That wonder still exists if you allow yourself to see it.

Since I began reading this way, I genuinely see the world more “glass half full.” Challenges feel lighter. Creativity flows easier. My nervous system feels calmer.

Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do for your career is to stop feeding the part of your brain that only performs — and start feeding the part that dreams.