How to Fall Asleep

Imagine, as you lie in bed with no way behind your shut eyes to bring about sleep, that you are in space. Imagine you are in that inky blackness with the light from innumerable stars shining around you and lighting up everything you can see. Breathing and exposure are not issues here, for in this version of reality, you are a disembodied consciousness that perceives and feels but does not need to physically be.

Imagine that you are floating, drifting like a scrap of paper on the surface of the open ocean. You pass through nebulas, with gases misting around you and the beginnings of stars, bits of matter growing in size and gravity. You drift through solar systems and pass by their beautiful planets. You float around the awe-inspiring might of red stars and blue giants.

Now, imagine that you are no longer a scrap of paper on the ocean’s surface but instead a rock sinking through the depths of the water with no way to change it. You become a falling object in space, like a shooting star but with no one to see you and make any sort of wish. The stars and galaxies fade from view and you are in one of the black spaces of the universe, where there are no stars or planets or anything, and there is no light, and you cannot scream, not even for the release that would come from pretending you weren’t completely helpless. You do not know when you will fall into a place with light. It is entirely possible and in fact likely that you never will and you will forever plummet through the darkness of space, immobile and voiceless.

This is the image that you will be stuck in as you lie under covers in a state of semi-consciousness. It will take you, and you will sail away into the darkness. Goodnight.

one way to get a story done

So the day before yesterday,  I wrote a few paragraphs that seemed like the opening to a short story. This was in the afternoon. 

Yesterday, without reading that opening, I continued from where I thought it left off and wrote a reasonable-length short story. For some reason, I ended up making breaks of a line’s worth of space, like I was breaking the story up into sections. This was between 12 PM and 1 AM.

Today, I read the first section compared to the next ones and found that they were almost completely compatible (I just had to change some of the names and phrasings I’d used in the first paragraph, which were not applicable to how I’d written the rest of the thing). I’m now wondering what it’d be like if I put the sections in the wrong order (I wrote it all chronologically) and I used a random number generator on the internet to put the story into eight different orders. I chose eight because that’s the number of sections that were in the story. This is from 6 to 7 PM.

Tomorrow, I’m going to read all eight of the different versions (or “remixes”, as I saved them) and see which I like best, or if I want to put them in a less-random but still anachronic order of my own. Or maybe I’ll decide that the original was perfectly fine as it was. I don’t know when I’ll do that.

Well, it’s one way to get a story done.