Complete the Story – and Discover What’s Really On Your mind

This is a psychological game that offers us an entertaining and unique way to learn about what’s really going on in our minds. We’re offered the beginnings of a story – and are then invited to imagine the rest. What might happen to the little boy and girl lost in the forest, or the old wizard who has just come across an ancient book in a monastery or the shipwrecked sailor on a dark volcanic island? The way we complete the story ends up showing us a remarkable, immense amount about our values, fears, concerns and hopes. Play the game in company for entertainment and confession; play it on your own to mine the contents of your deep self. 

Instructions

Take the story stubs and try to complete them without thinking too much in order to release the contents of your deep mind. 

Make your story very short; we suggest not much more than a minute or so. Relatively quickly move on to another story.

Observe what themes emerge as you tell story after story. What links are there between the stories you tell and aspects of your own life? Look out for how your stories are both about other people and, in a sense, always about you.

Play the game in company to observe and enjoy the contrasts in people’s minds. Or play on your own as an aid to reflection and self-analysis.

Story Stubs

On the first day of school, he walked past a group of fellow students in the cafeteria…

Ninety years from now, scientists invented an extraordinary machine that…

The child would wake up every night around 3am in order to…

Once upon a time, there was a fox who…

A teenager woke up one morning to discover they had developed a new power…

A talking cat showed up at the door of an elderly widow offering words of wisdom…

With the help of this time machine…

‘My biggest mistake,’ she thought, ‘was to…’

His great fears was that…

In a land in the future, people at last…

A little girl and boy were lost in a dark forest…

An old wizard came across a very special book in the library of a monastery…

A shipwrecked sailor ended up on the shores of a rocky volcanic island…

An exhausted traveller reached an inn at the end of a long, isolated road…

The woman waited tensely outside the office door…

A master sculptor vowed to carve the most perfect sculpture ever created…

An apprentice wizard was practising spells alone when something went terribly wrong…

In a peculiar shop with artefacts from around the world, an intriguing box called out to be opened…

The richest person in the land proclaimed a golden reward for anyone who could help…

Nothing could have prepared him for who he would meet on the train…

He wrote a novel that took the world by storm. It was the story of…

The woman returned home exhausted after…

The parents returned home to find…

A young boy looked up at his mother and thought…

A boy and his father went out one morning…

The doctor called up his patient…

The parents told their child that they had something important to…

The son invited both parents to…

Nothing was ever going to be the same again in the family…

A spouse returned from a trip and sensed that something had shifted in the marriage…

The manager left the office knowing…

The old man waited every day for the letter…

The day after was serene and sunny. Inside the house…

He remembered that summer at his grandparent’s cabin by the lake when…

She entered the psychotherapist’s office with a feeling…

In his notebook, the man started drawing up a plan…

Glancing in the mirror, she no longer recognized the person staring back…

They waited with great apprehension at the dinner table in the elegant restaurant…

The package had stamps on from a foreign country…

Every Sunday, he returned to the grave to…

She sighed deeply and thought, ‘I don’t care any more if…’

The driver was going ever faster down the country road…

It was the first night after the wedding. In the privacy of each of their minds…

The boss understood that things could not go on as before…

‘This will be the last time anyone ever speaks to me like this,’ he thought…

Every night the child lay in bed and…

The entire family was set to gather for three days of festivities…

He woke up in the middle of the night after a very strange dream…

When the will was read out to the assembled members, it became clear that…

Of all the siblings, Ursula was evidently…

On the outside, Mark was smiling as if nothing had happened; inside…

He couldn’t shake off a sense of discomfort with the person sitting opposite…

She decided to move across the country to…

The woman sat alone on the park bench wondering…

The train was delayed once again, giving him more time to reflect…

Sorting through old boxes, she discovered a box of photos…

The pregnancy test waited on the bathroom counter as they paced outside…

John read the letter over and over, trying to make sense of it…

Sitting across from each other at the table, neither knew how to start…

The scar remained as an ever-present reminder…

As he sat in the attic room, a raft of memories returned…