Yesterday, I had dinner at the home of some close friends. At some point, the conversation turned to what we see in our brains.

Do you see pictures like a movie or nothing at all? Do you have a voice that speaks to you, sort of like a running commentary–a second self to bounce ideas off of? What does your brain do when it is idle? I was surprised to learn one of my friends does math equations, and the other arranges gradients of color. When idle or stressed, my brain makes up stories. I call them bedtime stories, and surprise, I usually tell them to myself as I’m falling asleep.

It’s my way of not churning or ruminating on all real the things I could. There are whole little worlds full of whole people running around my brain, and I just tune in every night. And when the real world is a bit too much, I sometimes write down some of these stories from these worlds, and these people. This helps me work through problems and explore concepts that I don’t really understand — power dynamics between different types of people, politics, particular literary devices, and tropes (Ex: the time I wrote a whole novel employing reversals for each character as per Aristotle), and sometimes a little smut gets in there, too!

This week was a tough one, so while I did work on my project story, I spent more time writing bedtime stories about basically good and moral people trying to stay centered in themselves and committed to one another in a dark and chaotic world–a planet going through reconstruction after the end of slavery (a time that could have ended in civil war, but didn’t, and still might). Sometimes I wonder if those characters go to bed at night and tell themselves really chilling tales about a planet where the climate is crumbling, income inequality is out of control, people who defeated fascism nearly a century before suddenly run back to its embrace, and where a giant balloon coasting high up in the stratosphere is all anyone can talk about?

Here’s a little snippet of my bedtime story, for accountability’s sake.

“I don’t understand at all what it’s like to want to just be alone with only the earth under my feet and the sun on my face not talking to another person all day. I understand it so little that I have to take your word that it’s true and that it’s not just that you have been treated poorly by people who should have been obliged to love and respect you and now you prefer the company of plants.” As he spoke, C gathered P’s fine wedding clothes from the floor and hung them on the rack next to his Southern-style robes. Before he turned back to him, he smoothed the cloth tenderly. He took a long deep breath and stared at his hands as they moved along the weave. “Probably, it’s something in between. But there is no equation that adds up to you being a simple person. I wasn’t laughing at you; I was laughing at how absolutely absurd that entire idea is.”

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