I remember always, in my fantasy worlds, having a conflict between where my mind went and where, ethically, my mind should be going. I remember countless scenarios where women were degraded, and I kept trying to drag my mind out of the gutter, as it were. I imagined situations of slavery, of imprisonment, where people were tied and beaten, where people were pets who were led around on leashes, where men had sort of harems of wives. This was middle school, and okay, part of high school, but by reasonable standards, I was young - sex simply didn't enter into it, you must understand. In these harems there was never a sex act, never a rape - not even a Handmaid's Tale-style one.

Another scenario - this was an earlier one, perhaps - was the boarding-school one, its population gleaned from the autobiography of Roald Dahl and countless other books from the great English children's writers. Roald Dahl's book is peppered with the three anecdotes of the three times he was caned at public school. Each time there is an accompanying illustration, captioned "The cane" or "The cane - again!" And each time I looked at that picture with a mixture of horror and fascination. And I must have read the book through a few times, but I read the parts with the pictures of the cane many times more. I didn't understand why this fascinated me, and at the same time I gained a notion that it was "wrong" - the book was in our elementary-school library and I'd hide what I was reading during class from the other kids lest someone notice I was reading "that" section again.

So I peopled my boarding schools with the images of Roald Dahl's, but the story always went to commercial break when the door closed on the headmaster's study. The thought was fine, but actual pain was a bit beyond me. I did deal a good trade in imprisonment, though. This must have been elementary school, because I think I remember imagining this very early on: rows of little cells, with kids my age in them, and I don't know quite why they were there, but there was never unhappiness, despite imprisonment. There was sometimes a back story: maybe they were being kept safe there; I remember I think that at one point it was a facility where parents sent their children if they didn't want them in the house. The kids never went out of their cells unless accompanied by an attendant and on a sort of leash, and I remember thinking about how possible it was financially to employ all those attendants. But I also remember a series of witty exchanges between the prisoners, if you like, and the attendants - but the concept of prison bars was no more foreign in this world than might have been the standard concepts of my own life. There were other things, too - maybe in this fantasy world, a war began, and a knight captured the children of an opposing noble to be his slaves, but he treated them nicely and they played with his children, only constrained by the collars around their necks. You know the sort of thing.

Later on, the "school" scenarios changed. The system of punishment was just that, and not just a way of life; there would be a formulaic story whereby a group of kids broke the rules and were punished - usually imprisonment or a form of public humiliation; rarely did actual pain enter into the equation. I began to think that if this was in my head, I should stop lying my way out of consequences when I broke the rules in real life (a particular skill I have). I did so on only two occasions that I can recall, though. They were both different stories from the imaginary ones, and I could never apply the rules of the fantasy world to the real world.

The characters who peopled the fantasy world were very real in my mind. They all had names, and they grew older as I did, and just like always happened in real life, in my imagination I fell "in love" with a debonair, witty and hot guy a couple years older than me - except that in the fantasy world, he liked me back, and we and the rest of this group of friends would always have adventures together. Sometimes I wrote them down, or rather typed them up - but stories petered out, because I could not drag the vividness of my mind into the constraints of real life. The same characters existed, in the same schools or in otherwise fantastical settings, but my mind somehow gained this sense that what I was thinking was wrong, and that I shouldn't tell anyone else. It was something I myself could not face in the real world, too. I ran from the dinner table crying when my dad told stories about his school days, when corporal punishment was legal.

When one is a normal, middle-class child, living a very standard existence, one has it drummed in from quite an early age that brave Harriet Tubman led the slaves to freedom and that they escaped here to Canada, that terrible circumstances kept Africans enslaved and that the people who freed them were heroes. Of course a lot of this is mythology, but it is a rather good reason to not go round telling everyone when you're still in single digits that you imagined being a slave with a collar.

The summer when I was twelve, I was playing with my sister in the backyard of my grandparents' house. This was when my obsessions were swords, ships and Scotland, and I'd got her to play sailors or pirates or something with me. I intended to play out one of the things from my head - where our heroes are captured or something and tied up and whipped with a cat o' nine tails, inspired by a show I'd seen on TV about discipline on Royal Navy ships. But I couldn't get the words out to explain it to my sister - it seemed wrong, and the game went in another direction instead, because how do you make that seem legitimate, and how do you bring it into the light of day?

I didn't know that there were other people who maybe had the same experiences as me. I didn't know that anyone else maybe thought similar things in their heads, and I certainly didn't know at the age of 12 or whatever that this sort of thing was in any way connected to sexual pleasure. Now I know that there's a whole world about that, and I've caught glimpses of it online - but I still kind of wish I could go back to the time when there wasn't any second-guessing about it; it was just the way I was and it wasn't a secret, just something I didn't tell. Now I feel that it is a secret, because I'm an older person who sees fantasy differently now. Within the infinite spectrum of things that fascinate people, this facet, whatever you want to call it, is just one grain of sand, and yet it's a grain that a lot of people think is perverted or just kind of bizarre. But then there are also quite a lot of people who take it all in stride.

These days my fascination spills out of my head and out of the things I dream up late at night when I'm trying to fall asleep. Just like any adolescent, I turn every situation into an opportunity to giggle about something "dirty," though due to my previous predilections I may derive such opportunities from somewhat stranger situations - but this is all just a part of growing up, and no doubt I will someday outgrow this immature stage. I am an adolescent - I want to talk about the things that fascinate me, and due to that adolescence, it includes the things which turn me on, a new dimension to what enthralled me a few years ago. But I feel like I cannot talk about this, as much as I could talk about literature and language and music and humour and computers and even that hot girl over there. I feel it's something I have to hide - and to me, who is quite good at lying, this withholding of too much information seems somehow more duplicitous than a fabrication about why I didn't do the homework or the invention of a more colourful past.

All of a sudden, I felt as if I needed to explain. I wanted to acknowledge the things one can't quite acknowledge. I am about to post this and let my head free, and try not to be ashamed or feel as if it's wrong to let the world know what happens in my head. The Internet is full of the schlockiest schlock, so this simple confession - if one were to call it that - can hardly be considered quite remarkable in the ocean of threads in the World-wide Web. No doubt I will go off and do something silly like posting a link to this page in a public arena. But it is a relief to know that I've managed to write this down without veering off the subject, and maybe I feel a bit better for it. Confession and absolution do not always go hand in hand: I shall keep on thinking the exact same things. But it feels good to declare that I have thought them.