Since I’m so completely exhausted, I will share something weird about myself. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been inventing this story that I keep retelling to myself and that has accompanied me throughout my life.
Over the 3 decades that I’ve been composing it, the story has grown and become very convoluted. There is the protagonist (a very autistic, mostly non-verbal version of me who is still – and always – a literary critic) and a cast of supporting characters. There have been many twists and turns of the plot. Things that were first mentioned in the story, say, a quarter of a century ago, develop in strange new directions. Minor characters rise to prominence as their hidden relationship to the main plot line becomes revealed.
The story takes place in an invented world which I see in a very detailed way in my mind. The imaginary world has a map and everything. The characters have lived in a number of different houses over the years. I can see every single room in each of the houses in my mind, every piece of furniture inside them, every ornament on the walls.
As an actual literary critic, I can tell you that the story doesn’t have an ounce of artistic value. It’s like a Latin American soap opera. Or even worse, a really bad romance / fantasy novel. It has a huge psychoanalytic value, though. Whenever something traumatic happens to me in real life, I transfer it to the story – within the story’s magical terminology – and replay the situation there until it becomes non-threatening.
I don’t think I’ve gone to sleep even once in the last 30 years without telling to myself a new portion of the story or replaying some of the best parts from the past.
There is no particular point to this post. I just wanted to share.
Clarissa's Blog 
Before I go to sleep, I imagine a purely black spectre and a purely white spectre spinning together in embrace. Although undefined in their particular sense, one is male and one is female. They are at the head of the pillow. Then I call into myself all the other coloured spectres that are parts of myself which have been scattered across the world during the day. If I call them all into myself, I will have very intense and engaging dreams. If I have an ache or some tension in part of my body, I direct one of the colourful spectres into that body part, to take care of it.
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This sounds like a powerful spiritual practice. Did you invent it on your own?
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This is a perfectly normal experience, I believe. For me though, it doesn’t happen every night. Past moments of significance, some more memorable than others, and some that I’ve even totally forgotten, come up and play themselves in my head as I stare at the ceiling. I believe that great literature can come out of such re-inventions and recollections. 🙂
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It’s nice to hear I’m normal!
Nothing great is likely to come out of this in literary terms, though. 🙂
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What is your criteria for determining “artistic value”? I’m curious
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I’m just amazed you can keep a story straight after 10,000 installments. My mental soaps get canceled after a couple years at the latest.
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You must take a long time to fall asleep 🙂
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Yes, I never understood those people who don’t need at least an hour to fall asleep. 🙂
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Unless, I have something bothering me I can go out like a light. Otherwise I stay awake all night. Perhaps a protocol like yours would help on those nights.
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That’s so interesting. We humans talk a lot, but don’t spend much time sharing how each of us sees our inner landscape. I am friends with a woman who, when she reads, sees the whole story playing out on a stage in her mind, just like she’s in the theatre. When I read, I have very little visual accompaniment in my mind – which made me realize why I always skip over descriptive passages.
I am working on telling myself an ongoing to help me go to sleep at night, but it is a struggle for me, not at all like yours. And it is the beginning each night, never getting into a real plot!
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I think this is how all the great works of fantasy literature begin. I do not trust you to evaluate your own story literarily; I don’t think anyone can do this. So, I hope you write and publish it. (While I am alive to read it, of course.) I have lots of internal brief anecdotes, but certainly no such grand story. Yours sounds exceptional/wonderful!
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Thank you for the kind words, my friend!
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, in the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, in the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Or at least we do for a while.
–Joan Didion, “The White Album”
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