In the Christopher Nolan film, Inception, there is a scene where Cobb (played by Leo Di Caprio) and his group tour a secret basement filled with sleeping men hooked to IVs and dreaming the equivalent of 40 hours a day.

‘The dream has become their reality’, the watcher says.

When I was growing up, reading books had the same effect on me; I’d be in bed reading away for hours or days on end.

I would remember the books I read, but not the time I read them. There is a Christmas that I don’t remember to this day, but I vividly remember the book I read- The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy.

I was made to expect that when I finally ‘socialised’, or ‘got some friends’ or left the one-person island that my mother said I spent so much time in, things would be different. But alas, it wasn’t!

The world was boring! The people in it were as dull as the oatmeal I forced myself to eat every morning years later, in the (vain) hope it would lower my cholesterol levels. Or- it could all be just me. So to this day, I would dive right back to books when I needed a different and better reality.

I have a soft spot for fantasy; if genres were drugs, I would pick it not for the high but for its hallucinatory effect, and the longer the better.

The Chronicles of Narnia were the 1st fantasy books I read when I was in the 6th grade. It was so real to me, I kept inspecting closets for that secret door to another world.

In high school, I plowed through War & Peace and Anna Karenina- hardly fantasies, but to a 14-year old, 19th century Russia seemed exactly that- and I don’t think I finished either. In college- which really didn't get exciting until my last year- I passed the tedium of days reading through Tolkien (LOTR & The Hobbit ). Then it was the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, but I only got as far as the third book. Tried to start Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson with Gardens of the Moon, but couldn't finish it for some reason. I would have gone on and finished the entire Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey, but in the era before Kindle, it was hard to find books and they were also expensive- I only finished the 1st four books.

And it also happens that there are some books that are better off seen on screen. I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, but opted to watch the rest of the series on the big screen.

Lately, I discovered Raymund Feist’s Riftwar Trilogy which I finished while I was in Ashburton to visit Doyet and the family. It felt like being at home again in Pangasinan, comfortable with no care in the world; you read, slept and ate with the food magically appearing on the table.

Feist’s world-building of magicians, lords, dragons and sorcerers is familiar, but it’s the conviction in the writing that creates the illusion of being firmly in that reality. A thousand pages fly past like a fast-moving photo carousel and it no longer feels like reading, but living.

I finished the trilogy just as I was heading back to Auckland so I didn’t feel the full weight of that emptiness that almost feels like grief, as if you had just lost someone, when you finish a book that you’ve inhabited so completely.

You just sigh and face this reality with some reluctance.