When I was wee, I entered the Toshiba Inventors Competition (or somesuch, but note my recall of the brand – good sponsorship decision there, eh?) with a couple of kiddyinventor ideas. One was odd (an automatic door closer for fridges and freezers to stop you leaving the door open), the other was for an automatic fire extinguisher for a car engine, using pipes of extinguishant that burnt open.

I didn’t get anywhere with either entry (I vaguely remember a letter from the extinguisher one saying nice try but no). The first is, as far as I can tell, not something that has ever reached production. In-car fire extinguishers are everywhere. I’m not claiming IP infringement here, more that as I got older I started to notice many of the things I was thinking up being things that already existed or later existed.

I also have a habit of imagining or sometimes dreaming what are essentially bad action movie clips. Kind of what-ifs, but with destruction and noise and peril. In some parallel universe somewhere I’m advising the likes of Jan de Bont how to make his films even worse.

It might have something to do with the (unexpected to me) death of my dad at the age of nine, and my subconscious expectation of Bad Things Happening Unexpectedly as a result. Or maybe its just I watched too many James Bond films as a kid. Who knows, anyway, I do it. You know, a quick glance at one of those hydraulic platforms, and I’ll be momentarily wondering whether two people can have a fight on it whilst it drives itself around town.

This doesn’t happen all the time (I’m not mentally ill, as far as I can tell), but, just sometimes. It’s like one of my friends imagines what conversation she could have with people that she sees on the tube – what they might talk about if they were friends. (It’s quite a fun game to play, if you’re bored. That woman with the big gold bag, I bet we’d find we both read the same Haruki Murakami novel). I think she’s using this as a source to write a novel – generating ideas for characters and backstories.

Sometimes I wonder if I could stitch these action scenes together into some sort of Dan Brown-esque narrative for film or book – there’s one almost complete in my head, where I’ve managed to work out the characters a bit and thrown in some bad science for good measure. Oh, and an extended chase of one of our heroes around Edinburgh including a white Volvo estate being reversed off the summit of Salisbury Crags (I dreamt that while a student. I got freaked out by white Volvo estates for weeks afterwards.) It’s a bit 39 Steps, but hey, many stories are.

What I’ve noticed increasingly as time goes by is that something I’ve dreamt up, imagined etc appears later in a book I read or film I see. That happened to me recently, reading the Metro on the way home.

In an interview with a stunt driver, he describes a stunt filmed in London involving a beer delivery lorry driving through the streets of London, dropping kegs of beer off the side as it goes. Whoops, there goes another one (though mine, in the same story with the Volvo has someone on top of the kegs, who has to push them apart to shelter as the lorry is being driven through the glass doors of Edinburgh’s “beautiful” St James shopping centre, creating a pretty fan of kegs and breaking glass as it goes.) Beaten to the screen, again.

The thing is, that I’m not that bothered by it.

The trick is not to think “well, that’s another idea wasted” but “that’s another idea validated”. I know this, because as a child I started to think like the former, and it took a while to switch to the latter.

How much harder must it be for people who didn’t just daydream idly on the bus for a couple of minutes (don’t get me started on busses) but put time, effort and money into their ideas, only to see them beaten to the punch? Especially if their ideas are something positive and useful (ie, not a self-closing fridge door alarm)?

How do we encourage such positive thinking, especially in kids?