Imagine That

“Close your eyes,” I say, as I gently stroke my daughter’s eyebrows. We are curled up in the muted darkness of the big bed, and it’s late, and she needs to get to sleep. I tell her to picture someplace beautiful. Hawaii, maybe.

“I can’t picture that,” she says.

I suggest maybe Ella could picture somewhere she’s been, like the beach in San Diego.

“I can’t,” she sighs. “When I close my eyes, there’s just darkness.”

We lie there breathing steadily for a while, long enough that I suspect she’s sleeping. I close my eyes, too, and I try to imagine just darkness but behind my eyelids is a never-ending slideshow of dancing images projected silently against the blackness.

The night after we build the kids’ bed, she sits on the top bunk, cross-legged and pensive in a soft nightgown.

“I slept in a bunk-bed one time,” she says. “When we were on vacation, I think.”

I tug at the corners of my mind, finding some distant recollection of an AirBnB where Ella had claimed the top bunk. She couldn’t have been more than three years old at the time. I ask my daughter if that’s the one she’s remembering and she says, yes, that’s the one, and she declares that her memory is excellent.

We play games, sometimes, and she easily bests me four out of five rounds. One of her favorites comes in a short tube with eighteen pairs of circular cat pictures: it’s a matching game, and she can clean up the board in a matter of minutes. There’s a clarity in the way she stores and retrieves thoughts that has always escaped me. I’m the mom who belts along with our playlists inaccurately enough that my daughter will call out from the back seat, “Check your lyrics!” as she hides her face in the palms of her hands. Of course she loves to play memory games because she also loves to win, which she almost always does.

When Zeyde comes to visit, he brings a book called, “Put Your Mother on the Ceiling”. The book is really a game, he explains, and I watch as Ella follows the instructions through the first chapter.

Picture your mother, standing in the center of whatever room you’re in. It is your mother. She is wearing pants. And a shirt. And shoes. What color are the shoes? Picture them. Change their color to blue. Picture your mother wearing blue shoes, standing in the middle of whatever room you’re standing in. Now give her a hat. What color is the hat? Change the color of the hat to yellow. And her pants and shirt are red. She now has blue shoes, red clothes, and a yellow hat. Picture your mother standing in the room you’re in wearing all that. Now change the color of her hat. Change it again. Now, have your mother, wearing all that, walk to the wall. Have her take a step onto the wall. Have her walk up the wall. Is she holding the hat on her head? She better, so it doesn’t fall off.

She is giggling, wracked with the kind of laughter that has her holding her stomach and squeaking on the exhale. Her eyes are closed and whatever this is to her, it has her engaged and her synapses are crackling. She lives for this. I won’t take a sojourn into the thorny history of the author of the book, Richard de Mille, who once assisted L. Ron Hubbard in a kidnapping, and I have no idea if he meant for this book to be funny or if it was supposed to be a serious psychological exercise. But like most things for this inquisitive, insatiably creative five-year-old, this is a game.

“What did you mean?” I ask her. “When you said that you can’t see anything when you close your eyes: What did you mean by that?”

She looks at me like I’ve asked if her peanut butter sandwich tastes like peanut butter.

“I mean,” she spreads her hands, gesturing grandly, “I don’t actually see anything in my imagination.”

Silence.

She goes on. “My imagination is like a book with no pictures. Just words.”

I chew on this, digest it. “So, how do you remember, you know, what your brother looks like?”

“My mind tells me. It says, ‘He has curly hair.’ And then I just know that he has curly hair.”

“Wow. You have a very interesting mind!” I tell her.

“I know,” she replies cheerfully.

Later that night, I Google furiously, and I stumble down the rabbit hole of Minds That Are Books with No Pictures, otherwise known as having the condition called, “aphantasia”: the inability to voluntarily create mental images in one’s mind.

There are blogs and educational journals, studies and articles that explore people with this condition, self-identified “aphants”. Of all the descriptions authored by those who experience an exclusively narrative imagination, none is quite as sharp and succinct as Ella’s. There is reassurance in the resounding consensus that nothing about aphantasia makes for a disorder or disability. It is a diversion from typical neuro-cognitive integration of memory and sense in that it’s understood to be rare: it seems that most people, when told to put their mother on the ceiling do, indeed, conjure an image of their mother on the ceiling. And while the world may operate on the assumption that everyone has an illustrated imagination, Ella’s mind is text-only. Words spin out of her in a compelling and descriptive manner that exposes her rich inner monologue.

Like Ella, I had trouble falling asleep as a child. My bed was an expansive, fluffy queen four-poster under a mountain of comforters in the back corner of our ranch-style home. That side of the house was tucked behind a wreath of thick green bushes, hidden from the street. Quiet reigned. In the still shadows of nighttime, the dark folds of my young mind were fertile territory for unsettling thoughts. I felt tiny, exposed, my muscles coiled tight with anxiety.

There was a creak in the floorboards between my room and my parents’. My father would meet me halfway as I wandered in a daze, intent on crawling into the haven of their bed, complete with reassuring surround-sound snoring. When I was six or seven, my parents gifted me a clock radio for my nightstand. I thumbed through the FM channels on the ridged black dial: classical music on 93.9; the country music on 94-something; soft contemporary. Nothing soothed me. The hush of slow tempos only foregrounded my racing thoughts; lively favorites had me humming and tapping along. One night, I clicked over to the AM dial and found a talk radio station with a late-night trivia show. I found myself drifting downwards into the white noise of dialogue, words swirling and dancing across my brain. From then on, I fell asleep clutching conversation like a security blanket.

I loved playing word games, especially with my mom. Unlike my daughter, though, I often lost. My mom was a brutal opponent in our battles over Scrabble and Boggle, tearful matches that stretched my skills and taught me that there was no such thing as “letting you win”. Long ago, when I was training for a 10K, I learned that muscles are built through microtears. The body floods the strain with blood and nutrients, and in the spot where pain and injury were centered, there grows a new and stronger muscle. My young mind was fibrous and tender, and I yearned to wield a feisty, complex vocabulary. I devoured books and fell excruciatingly in love with the written word.

The first week of January each year, I facilitate a midwinter retreat for sacred music-makers in Palm Springs. It’s the first day of programming, and I’m exhausted and I’m fighting a cold and my voice is raw. Inside, I am burning with frustration. Relaxing in this vacation space among my musical compatriots, all I want to do is sing, and I cannot. At the door to the conference room, my friend Charlie is leaning on his cane, explaining what we can expect in the coming hour. Someone reaches up to tie a soft scarf across my eyes, and I am guided into the pitch blackness, into a cold seat where music penetrates the dark. It seeps in from all sides, and I am pleasantly disoriented, plunged into a sound bath.

In the dark, enveloped in the sweet music emanating from all directions, I am freed from judgment, from worry, from the weight of anxiety. Transcending the moment, I begin to experience this as holy meditation and images surface as if washed out from a photo negative beneath a red light. I visualize a cool amphitheater on the bow of a ship, and the scene is surprisingly vivid. I am in the room, and I am on that ship, and I am in the dark.

I feel healed by this experience, and I want to return to the calm I found in that sanctum of lucid imaginings. For weeks afterward, I research the realm of third-eye meditation. I discover my penchant for vivid visualization, uncovering communities of others who, like me, can travel maps of the world in their brain. We are, many of us, synesthetes: our senses flipped and mis-wired so that we taste colors and see the days of the week as a bowed-out rainbow. I fixate on an essay describing life with “Ticker-Tape Synesthesia”. It’s as if every conversation in the world, every sentence out of their own mouth and others’, is closed captioned against an invisible backdrop projected at the bottom of their visual field.

I shut my computer screen. Digging through my purse, I pull out my phone and find the latest downloaded podcast and press “play”. Staring off into the distance, I watch as a strand of letters fills my vision and tears well in my eyes and my consciousness trembles at the joy of dumbfounded self-discovery. “How long have I even…” Forever. I have seen words, always.

“Look! It’s an ‘s’ and it isn’t backwards!”

“That’s great, sweetheart,” I say.

“I drew it without looking,” she says.

“Oh. Well, that’s not how it’s supposed to work.”

“But it did work! My fingers felt how it’s supposed to go.” She smiles broadly, proud of her writing progress.

“I love how your brain works in such an unusual way.”

“Everyone’s brain works in an unusual way,” she says.

In the deepest depressive slump of COVID yet, I’m watching the third season of a comedy I’m binging alone, on my cell phone mostly in the moments between drying dishes and brushing teeth and picking up the kids’ strewn toys again, and again. I’m excited that there is a so far authentic representation of an Orthodox Jewish woman and I’m intrigued. That is, until the whole construct falls to pieces when her non-Jewish girlfriend sneaks into the mikvah, which is depicted as a YMCA-esque public pool, and everyone runs screaming as if the place will have to be drained. A feeling creeps over my body like itchy wool and I want to melt into myself. And I have this singular, fierce, sure thought that I know nothing about anyone’s life. If this is what they think my world is, and I (wrongly) think I understand their worlds from what are just as likely to be incorrect depictions in media, then we are all walking about the world, talking past each other, mistakenly convinced that we understand everyone else.

Someone just came in the door.

Like no one I ever saw before.

I feel…

I feel…

I don’t know where you came from.

I wish I did

I feel so dumb.

I feel…

Your swagger and your bearing

and the just right clothes you’re wearing

Your short hair and your dungarees

And your lace up boots.

And your keys oh

Your ring of keys.

“Who’s she singing about, Mom?”

I hit pause on the car stereo as we wind through the canyon. The question surprises me because we’ve heard the song enough times that Ella was belting along until she stopped to ask.

“Well, this is from a show called, ‘Fun Home’. And it’s about a girl who grows up and realizes that she’s gay. And her dad is, too. And both of them have a hard time with that because it’s not something a lot of people talk about or say is okay in the time and place where she was growing up.”

“And the keys have something to do with this?”

We’re at a stoplight. I have a moment to pause and digest.

“There’s something about the way this person who walks in the door is dressed. And the way they move and walk and talk. It makes the little girl feel like there is a type of grownup in the world that looks like the kind of grownup she might want to be.”

“Got it. Can you press play again?”

Like any good ritual, bedtime has evolved slowly over the years. Elana Arian’s adaptation of a mindfulness prayer is the cornerstone, the final notes heralding sleep or at least the hope of sleep.

Some nights, Ella sings along with me, and I welcome the sweetness of her small, confident voice. I come to expect the occasional duet. Then, one night, Ella breaks into a harmony, and it’s this perfectly natural improvisation that fits within the chord. It emerges from an intuitive part of my daughter that even I know cannot be designed or trained, located or mapped; it just is. It exists, and emerges, and I’m flooded with the joy of recognizing parts of me embedded within this beautiful soul.

It’s probably conceited to say,

But I think we’re alike in a certain way

I…um…

When I was little and felt like one of the smallest people in the world, I searched for others who looked and sounded and seemed like me. As a teen, I wanted nothing more than to be unique and find a personal sense of expression. Then my children were born, and I searched their tiny countenances for resemblances, for features that we shared.

It’s probably conceited to say, but I think we’re alike in a certain way.