This is the part where I get close to having an epiphany, but don't actually have one

Once upon a time, in a vain attempt to understand me and my weirdo brain, my mother asked me how I think. Which is a kind of hard-to-answer question, if you think about it. "How do you think" is about as easy to describe as "what does it feel like to breathe" or "what does blue look like." You've only ever done it one way and therefore have no basis of comparison.

The final answer that we came to was that while she (my mother) thinks in a kind of... string of words?, I think in a picture. In fact, pretty much none of my thinking happens with words anywhere attached. This explains a lot about how I act and feel in general, so I'm happy that we figured that out.

The weird thing, then, is that recently I've noticed that when I'm very tired, and in that same almost-asleep state where you dream that you're walking along a curb and suddenly fall off it, or a car drives by really close and you have to leap out of the way, and your muscles jerk around and wake you up, I've been having... word dreams. Like, not really a dream, so much as a floating persona in front of me, saying words at me. I can hear someone, my friend or relation or coworker, saying these words, these words clearly and in a kind of loud but conversational tone. Words like amorphous and defensible and caricature and baffled and leeway. The words are spoken in a string and I can recognize each word, but only after they've said about twenty words or so and I startle myself awake do I realize that they weren't actually saying sentences at all, but long strings of nice-sounding words.

I wish I understood me and my weirdo brain.