We invented numbers, then we assigned meaning to them, both everyday meanings and special meanings when they show up in a certain way, like 11:11. That’s how everything we do works. We make something up. We agree on what it means, or at least some of us do. We find aberrations that appeal to our cognitive biases and imbue those aberrations with magic, extraordinariness. We can’t just accept that everything is extraordinary all the time, no sleight of hand needed. No tall tales.

But we love stories, don’t we? Stories like the white salamander letter. (Look it up. You won’t regret it.) Even I love that story and am terribly sad it was based on a forgery. A real untrue story, fully committed to, is better than a con, I think. It’s close to poetry. Maybe it doesn’t matter: origin, intent. Something in us needs stories, and we’ll get them one way or the other.

I dreamed I was in a large, tiered, auditorium-style room looking for a place to sit so I could read a book and drink some tea from a demitasse teacup. I was dressed like Alice from Alice in Wonderland. Everyone else in the room was male or male-bodied. All the seats were leather and moist from the glandular skin of those who’d recently sat in them. None of the seats were right for me.

I suddenly felt scared and ran out of the room into a long hall. It was a secret part of the library in my hometown at the university where my father worked. Red carpet and decor. Brown spines. Brown wood. Books covering every wall all the way to the ceiling. The smell of dust and leather and cigars. The air hazy.

A man in a tophat and his rabbit held open the curtain to an adjoining room. The curtain was maroon and heavy, with thick twisted gold fringe, the kind where each twist is under constant tension from being held in its contorted shape. I walked through it. I have no idea what happened next, but I know something happened next.

I write stories in my sleep, that rich world I visit every night. What comes to me is essential, life-giving nonsense. I couldn’t live without it. That world is loose, vivid, surprising, and informed by every moment of my life, all outside of time. Ah, time. Now, we’re back to numbers, their rigidity and our desire to break them out of that box they must live in most of the, ahem, time to serve us and let them walk through the curtain into who knows what, who knows where. All we want to do is follow.