How to relax

LHS and I were musing the other day on how once you find out a little about how people's brains function, you always end up thinking to yourself - "Yeah, well you're actually pretty strange. "

(This discussion came up just after we had discussed dream-logic, and how strange dreams are.)
And, to illustrate the point, I'm going to share the way that I relax before I go to sleep. It seems perfectly natural to me, but it may well leave you thinking that I'm a bit nuts.

The technique goes like this.

Just before I turn off the light before I go to bed, I'll take a mental 'picture' of my room - where all the furniture is, and what's piled where, and so on. Then, after I close my eyes, I imagine that I can open up my head. I never really thought about this, but I guess I imagine four flaps opening up on my head like the lid of a box. Out of my head comes a whole bunch of boxes, that represent all the thoughts that I've been fussing over all day. Each box is colour coded and a different size, depending on relevance and emotion. I then imagine these floating through the air, and landing in various empty spaces in my bedroom.

So typically, there's a bunch of green boxes (things I feel guilty about), red boxes (thing I've been actively working on), pink boxes (romantic thoughts about people and places), and blue boxes( ideas and prospects), then a few little black ones that are full of thoughts that make me feel terrible. Once I've gone through this exercise, I lie there with my head empty and try to come to terms with what it feels like to have nothing in my head. Sometimes my room is really full of imaginary boxes, and sometimes there's not many at all.

If I'm not asleep by then, then I float all the boxes back into my head. Sometimes I leave boxes out on purpose (usually black and green ones) and then close my head back up again.

I've been doing this ever since I was about 12 - And to me it seems perfectly normal. But having it all written down here makes me feel as though maybe I'm a bit nuts.

See? People are innately strange...

What crazy things does your brain do when it's time for bed?