I average around once a week. More often when I was a kid, but probably once a week now.
When I find myself alone, bored, and doing some mundane task, my internal monologue often amuses itself by explaining what I’m doing to an imaginary alien that just landed in my backyard.
We humans enjoy drinking water that has been heated and passed through ground up roasted beans from a particular plant. We call it coffee.
I’m definitely prepared to explain drinks, mowing the lawn, and the US Interstate Highway System if aliens ever show up. Sleep, I’m not so sure about, because it could be risky to let potentially hostile aliens know humans spend a third of our existence unconscious.
What does your internal monologue do to pass the time?
I like to play out scenarios in my head to great detail. Like my last one: What if horses could fly? How would humanity evolved if we had easily domesticated animals that could fly that we could ride on? Would we have ever invented the car or train? Would there be highways? Would we have invented the airplane sooner than we did?
I tried talking to the aliens once but they kept twisting in and out of an orthogonal dimension, and their speech was mostly indecipherable squeeks and whistles along with some complex somatic signalling, so I just fed them some fish and they went away.
I talk to myself (internally) wondering about this and that, coming up with and discarding (usually by forgetting) a variety of questions that I think might be interesting enough to post here to, hopefully, spark a discussion.
If I’m driving, I’m talking to the other drivers, sometimes loudly, almost always in sentences laced with a variety of vulgar suggestions regarding the nature of their intelligence and parentage. Sigh, seems like all the terrible drivers are moving here lately
I do this all the time, imagining situations and seeing what evolves from them or how people would react to them. Sometimes I even talk to aliens. Heck, this is how I write.
Sometimes I talk to aliens – including occasionally in the fashion of the OP; that one most often when I’m driving, and imagining the alien in the passenger seat, trying to make sense of both the car and the stuff outside the windows. Sometimes I talk to the plants (crops or otherwise), or the bugs, or the cats, or the weather, or Coyote. Sometimes I design societies in my head. Sometimes I tell myself stories about the people in them.
Once in a while I even get bits of it written down.
– many years ago, in some group of people or other, I said something about a society in my head; someone said ‘you have societies in your head?’ and I said ‘sure, don’t most people?’
Everybody in the group turned around and looked at me. Just looked. And I thought ‘OK, something else about me that’s weird, I guess.’
I’ve never talked to aliens, but when driving alone I have occasionally given Ben Franklin, newly arrived from a time travel machine, a tour of 21st century America. Or mused on how to spend my $120 million dollar power ball winnings, down to the travel arrangements for my year long world tour and the details of the homestead I’m building in Colorado. The replica Oval Office is a must see! Or I work on the novel I’m writing if I ever go to prison - it’s set on a spaceship traveling to another star to find a replacement earth. Because of the length of the trip, this generation will be born and then die on the ship, never having been on a planet.
My “alien” is Abe Lincoln. I show him all the wonders of the 21st century. He’s most impressed with things that are easy for him to understand, like electric lights and horseless carriages (with heat and music!). Things like computers and smart phones are too far beyond him, and are “magic”.
He absolutely hates telephone poles and all the wires, but loves supermarkets.
The play was a comedy, and not a particularly highbrow one, with silly characters and catchphrases; so between that and some of the other things I know about him, I suspect Abe Lincoln would really enjoy at least some modern comedy.
I have conversations with a younger version of myself – I started doing it with the 14-year-old me, but these days, it’s more likely to be the 25-year-old me.
Yeah. This is me. And the person from the past is often me when I was 18 years old or so. I STILL don’t believe the changes we’ve seen in the last 40 years.
I’ve had conversations with my college age self. One of the first things he says is, he looks down his nose and asks me, “When did we start liking the Go-Gos?”
