when home alone, do not think about:

just wanna follow molly's thoughts up with a few lessons about the darkness that i've learned from having insomnia my whole life:

-don't try to figure out whether you're becoming a vampire. my reasoning was basically that i am pale and some of my teeth are sharp and i don't like to be awake when the sun is up. here are a few ways to talk yourself out of that.
a) you're probably not a vampire.
b) when did you become a vampire? that's not the kind of thing that just happens. you'd remember. are there scars?
c) there is garlic in almost EVERYTHING. you probably ate garlic with dinner. think through the last few meals you ate and whether they were delicious or if they burned your mouth like coals.

-don't try to figure out whether you are real. problem thinking! and there are a lot of ways to fall into this pit.
a) the matrix. you're probably not in the matrix because if you were they probably wouldn't have made movies about the matrix. unless they were trying to get you to think that you're not in the matrix! shit!
b) some sort of pale fire/sophie's world sitch where you turn out to be a character in a book. chances are that if someone is writing a book about you then you have some sort of interesting, meaningful name. try making anagrams of your name. are any of them awesome? the best i can come up with is "amid my gut" which is pretty lame. so if i'm a character in a book it's not the kind where people have clever anagram names.

-don't think about local myths. i come from the part of the country that brought us the blair witch, the mothman, and the goatman (these last two are way scarier than they sound). they're probably not real. but 3AM when nobody else is up is the last time you want to be tryin to learn how many mysterious unsolved abductions there are in rural maryland, and how many teeth get found in soda bottles without too many questions gettin asked.

-don't think about any illness that has ever existed. no matter how cured it is. because at 3:30 AM in the dark by yourself, you've got nobody to ask about that mysterious bump. it's sorta raised! it's sorta tender! could this be the plague? you probably don't have the plague. and if you do, there are probably a million grosser diseases you could be dying from.

this is a cursory list. there are plenty of other things i should tell you not to think about but you'll probably figure them out on your own. next time you're lying alone in bed. and you can't sleep. and you hear a noise that's probably just the wood creaking or just the sink leaking or maybe it's just rats in the pantry.