Like any really rabid fan of anything, Deadheads, Yankees fans, Obama supporters, we who love Disney can seem a little scary.  Ours is a world of fantasy run amuck, and we don’t like letting go of the feeling we get from Disney parks, movies, or music. Is there some kind of arrestment of emotional or mental development that has caused us to want to retreat to this Fantasyland?

Whatever reason or the extent of our dementia, I really like and feel one with the people at WDWMagic.com - they are Disney fans, like me, who are all either at WDW or planning a trip to WDW. They are people on an internet forum, not people I know in real life, so I don’t know much about them except that they love WDW as much as I do. I have vague ideas of their ages, sex, geographical location and things like that, but I’m not really sure. All that is certain is that we share the love of Disney.

A few days ago we started chatting about how sometimes we planned trips to WDW that we knew we couldn’t take, just for fun. We’d pick dates, check the price of airfare, and see how cheap of a resort rate we could get. We’d think about what we’d like to do when we were there and where we’d go to dinner.  All of the sudden, plans were being made for a group pretend trip.

We talked about where we would all stay (I think we decided that if it were going to be a successful fantasy, we should just all stay where we liked), and when we should go. People started offering to take everyone to dinner (“Dinner’s on me at Victoria and Albert’s!”), pay for drinks, and buy park tickets for the group.

It got more elaborate and more (pretend) extravagant. People were offering to rent out the Magic Kingdom for our private use and other wild, fun treats. People were coming from out of the woodwork to join in and getting more and more excited and I suddenly realized that we were playing - playing as intensely and as happily as any little kid who pretends to the point of almost believing what he is pretending is true. One woman (I think she’s a woman) said that she’d been sick and that this “fake trip” as we were calling it, was making her feel so much better.

So we’re a bunch of adults that still know how to play and pretend. I think that is what we all have in common, and why we all love WDW so much.

To quote the scary twins in “The Shining”,

“Come play with us. Forever. And ever. And ever.”