How They Stole My Brain

At night, just before I fall asleep, when I feel myself slipping away into a dream, I can swear that someone is using my brain to have a conversation.

I can hear them argue, two of them, going back and forth, back and forth. Sometimes it becomes so annoying that I focus on it and I wake up. Then the voices retreat, back into silent shadows somewhere. They wait for me to dose off so they can return and use my pathways and brain structures to send each other secret messages.

I have no idea who these people are. And if it’s the same ones each time. If a third one maybe joins in from time to time, giving the others additional information, or asking them to keep the noise down. I have no idea if they use my brain every single night or only sporadically, and if they continue to use it after I fall asleep, siphoning off valuable brain power from parts of my mind not used for dreaming and resting. I have no idea if they alternate between using my brain and using someone else’s. If there’s maybe a whole bunch of us, a whole pack of victims, distributing the load of their secret messaging needs. And I don’t know if these are real, flesh and blood people. People like myself, alive and well, living down the street somewhere. I don’t even know why they would need the use of my brain, in addition to their own.

So I turn over in the dark, enjoying the feel of the soft, clean sheets, and I try not to think. I try to keep my mind blank and just slip away. And as my thoughts become untangled, concrete ideas and worries melting away into pliable sur-reality, as unformed dream-images start to flit across my mind’s eye like harmless, virtual lightening, the voices return. Hushed, urgent, self-important.

I really don’t know the first thing about them. Whether they are perhaps the voices of another kind of beings. Things from another galaxy, another reality, a different set of energetic frequencies from what we happen to perceive as solid matter. Or if these are perhaps the voices of ghosts. The voices of the dead; hardly aware of what they are doing or whose brain they are using.


I realize I don’t even know if my brain is being used on purpose. Maybe it’s just cross talk that I’m picking up. Unintentional induction of thought, received during a freak state of hyper sensitivity. Perhaps my brain picks up messages continuously, and I only notice it when my mind goes quiet, when it’s shutting down.

I have no idea. I have no idea because there are no clues as to the mechanisms involved. I don’t even know whether what the voices are actually saying is really that important. Whether it couldn’t wait till morning.

I’m not sure if they are plotting against me, if they want to take me over completely at some point, if they are talking about someone else and simply see me as a dumb mechanism, an instrument. I’m not sure if they are doing me harm or are somehow fixing me, making me better, or even if the voices are, perhaps, merely a hallucination.
Although, to be honest, that last idea sounds rather unlikely.