9:00p.m. Book closed. Light off. Go to sleep. Or so I hoped. But in a dark room, left with nothing but my thoughts, my brain raced ahead. Sometimes it dwelled on school; whether I’d done well on a test; what I’d done during the day that I regretted.

But I usually wasn’t that lucky, and those simple doubts dispersed soon after they came, if they did. And instead of those petty, ephemeral worries, I was left to the darker side of my imagination. The side that, during the day, in the light with other noises around, I could ignore. The side that was always there, lurking, prowling, waiting for my defenses to drop, so that it could infect my mind.

It filled my thoughts with ideas, scary ideas, and once those thoughts took root, they held onto my mind as strongly as a giant oak tree holds on to the ground. And they couldn’t be dispelled. Not with anything, until exhaustion prevailed and sleep took me.

Almost every night they came back, impossible to disregard. Was I deserving of these thoughts, this early in life? But life, those thoughts about life, still haunted me. Or was it life at all I was thinking of? Life was fine, happy, bright as a sunny day. But all those dark thoughts, they did have to do with life. They wouldn’t exist without it. And there was no other word to replace ‘life’ with that would describe them.

What was ‘life’ after all? Was it just some dream? Not a dream of my own, but maybe one of giants. Giants wasn’t the right word, though. Yet, it stuck in my head, and for a while, what controlled my thoughts were giants, playing with their dolls that were us on Earth. Life was nothing more than a giant’s toy.

But I had thought that it was a dream, not a game. Was this ‘life’ that everyone on Earth was lucky enough to receive simply a dream- someone’s dream? When that someone woke up, what would happen? Would we just fade out of existence, or still be here, a reality created by that “person’s” ideas? Was every human on Earth an individual “person’s” dream? Then when that “person” woke up- that could be when someone died.

And death, the opposite of life, but where would either be without the other? What was death? An even more mysterious concept than life, completely unknown. Would there be a Heaven or an H-word that people went to, forced to live eternally? I wouldn’t like that, being alive forever after life. That’s what death is for, after all. But what else could happen when you died? An endless void. And you, you’d be like a disconnected telephone. Suddenly unavailable. Gone. All the thoughts haunting my head gone, but all of the good ones, too. Impossible to imagine, because you’d have no imagination. And which was worse? Eternal afterlife, or nothing at all?