Wish Fulfillment
It starts as a blend of Star Wars and Ranger Rick. I had started a Ranger Rick fan club with my best friend Josh Nissim and his little brother Jared, and I guess Josh? I think there were four of us, but it couldn't have been Josh, and it couldn't have been then, because Josh would have been really little, but I guess he had been taken to see Star Wars (at the Rogers, I think, on East Main (?)). (East Wood. But it was the Rogers Theater. Wow, that came out of nowhere.)
Anyway, the "Animi Knights" were a take on Jedi Knights, except we had the power to communicate with animals, turn into animals, and we fought with tree branches in Josh Nissim's backyard.
The next time the Animi makes an appearance, I'm in sixth grade at the Lutheran school. I see an interaction between some boys and girls in the hallway in front of the bathrooms, and I'm taken with this idea of boys and girls being on two different sides in a war. I start daydreaming about it, and it grows into this saga were a group of women are in control of this area in the mountains, it's a forest and it's winter, the women are in charge and the men do the manual labor, and there's a small group of men who've rebelled and are living in the forest, and then this guy in our world, and I don't know why this is important, but it was, establishing how he went from our world to their world, it was common on TV or in movies, I think, the other world couldn't just be it's own world, anyway, this guy in our world gets hit on the head and wakes up in the other world, only now he's the Animi, and he leads the men against the women which is essentially the plot from my novel.
I daydreamed about this a lot at school, and then one night I was thinking about it as I fell asleep, and had a really vivid dream based on it. And when I woke up, things were different, were better, because I had discovered The Dream. The Dream was place you where you could go to escape. Life was inherently boring, and if I couldn't be playing with my toys or watching TV, then I would be in The Dream. The Dream was this story, and whenever I got bored or just wanted to get out of reality, I would start playing through this story in my mind. And I'm still escaping into The Dream to this day, though now The Dream mostly takes the form of video games.