I was driving down the road the other day and caught myself having a conversation with a person (a real person I know) who wasn’t in my car. It was all in my head. As I thought about it more and more I realized I do this all the time. I started wondering if other people do the same thing. Do you have a conversation with someone you know even though they aren’t there?
To be clear it’s typically not so much a conversation as it is a diatribe. It’s me talking about something and assembling comments meant to be provocative, funny, or maybe absolutely outlandish about something. I suppose when you get right down to it, it’s a lot like a blog, but you don’t type the brain traffic, you only run it through this imaginary conversation.
So is this out of the norm? Am I dysfunctionally coping with the tension between needing social interaction and my introverted tendencies by having contrived conversations in solitude? I do often like being alone. When I drive, I rarely play music when I am in the car and don’t listen to the music when it’s playing. I’ll listen to people talking on the radio but typically get turned off by whoever is speaking before too long and then lapse in my version of a conversation.
Is this unhealthy? My imaginary friends and family don’t seem to mind. At least they don’t argue with me when they are hypothetically conversing with me. Maybe I should try to make the conversations real and use some of the cell phone minutes that go wasted in any given month. The problem with this is my contributions to any given dialogue are typically so uninteresting, I am fairly certain that before long, no one with caller ID would answer my calls.
Anyway, all you people out there that I am giving an imaginary speech to, let me know if you think I am going off the deep-end. Or I guess maybe arrange some sort of intervention with a qualified mental health care provider. If you don’t think it’s a problem – well I’ll just talk to you later – at least in my mind I will anyway.
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