I don’t think your tendency to drift while reading is necessarily bad, your window to read is lower than most people's.

Although as a bookworm myself, visualizing writing is precisely the reason why I love reading. There are a few tv and film adaptions of books that I love that I probably won’t ever watch because the world I've built in my head with author's aid won’t match the director’s vision. However, I recently finished watching Washington Black on Hulu based on the novel of the same name which I thoroughly enjoyed and apparently the book is way better. So off to the library I go to put a hold on it.

There’s a line in Chapter “On Prayer” in poetry book The Prophet by Khalil Gibran that is especially dear to me because of the imagery it instantly invokes for me.

“When you pray you rise to meet in the air those who are praying at that very hour, and whom save in prayer you may not meet.”

I’ve struggled with prayer (especially salat) as an adult and I quickly read this line before I start what is essentially a daily gratitude/dua journaling practice. Before I start, I read this passage and I always visualize my soul leaving this body and sitting side by side the people that might be praying at that very moment: my parents who live a couple of hours away, someone in the Eastern hemisphere that might be praying Isha, someone in Europe attending morning mass or a family on the West Coast that might be getting ready to start an indigenous prayer circle. As we finish, we start to descend back to our bodies and others start to ascend once they begin their prayer rituals. On days where I feel disembodied, reading this poem and visualizing this scene helps me feeling connected again.

As a corporate bee, I am trying to get back into long-form writing and I actually just finished watching a few youtube videos on storyboarding even though I’m trying to write creative non-fiction and it’s helped so much! I finally figured out the structure for a topic that’s been rattling around in my mind.