Among the many weirdnesses of my brain: if I’m having trouble getting to sleep, I can usually watch some of a film or listen to music in my head. If I’ve watched a film a few times, my memory can project large passages of it for me as I lay there with eyes closed, and I have a small library of music I can play back. It gets strange on the edge of sleep: the other night, I listened to an instrumental version of Arcade Fire’s “Tunnels,” – I always found the lyrics and Win Butler’s voice faintly annoying, but I love that delicate, curlicued repeating refrain, and the end section, where the music peaks and splashes away at the crest as the band ride out. So the next day I went to YouTube and found an actual instrumental version that exists. It’s missing a few things from mine – I retained the distant cooing at the end from the original, in my version.

It’s an interesting place to be: to invent music in hypnagogia and find it on the internet in the morning.