The Stories We Tell Before Sleep

People say I fall asleep too fast. That I’m always the first to drift, the easiest to rest. They see the calm, the early nights, the quiet that fills the room when I close my eyes. But they don’t know, Inside, a story is always waking. Before my breath slows, before my body surrenders to the dark, my mind blooms like a secret garden, full of whispers, of dreams, of selves I have not told anyone. There’s a certain kind of silence that falls before sleep. Not the silence of peace but the kind that waits for a story. And so, I tell one. Not to escape the world but to remember who I’d be if fear had never taught me to shrink. I build a life behind my eyelids: a love that sees me, a power that belongs to me, a version of myself who walks boldly, and speaks softly only by choice. Some would call it fantasy. But I call it a language. The soul has always spoken in symbols and mine writes with the ink of yearning, with scenes I’ve never lived but somehow always known. In these dreams, I am not perfect but I am real, and I am chosen, and I belong. And maybe that’s what matters most. That before sleep, before the world pulls me into its rules again, I get to remember what it means to want to hope to feel to rehearse joy like a prayer I don’t know how to say out loud yet. If this is dreaming, let it be sacred. Let it be the rehearsal of healing. Let it be a soft place for my heart to go Until the life I build starts to sound like the story I’ve been telling myself all along. And if you do the same, if you write love letters in your head before bed, if you replay heartbreaks or imagine a different ending, if you speak with someone in your mind who’s never really been there— you’re not broken. You’re just trying to return to a self you miss, or a future you’re still brave enough to believe in. So dream. Softly. Loudly. Repeatedly. Until the distance between who you imagine and who you are feels like coming home.