Yes, I talk to myself.

I say, “O.K., we’re going to put in a load of laundry, then we’re going to water the garden, write blog post, start supper.” The purpose of this should be obvious. It helps me organize the twenty things I want to do, triage them, and make the winners my official Next Activity. This is hard to do without saying stuff out loud (at least, for me). My thoughts don’t do well when they are left inside my head unsupervised.

Notice that I call myself “we” for purposes of decision making. This may be a side effect of having raised three children.

But I also talk to other entities that are not visible to the naked eye. I talk to God, of course. “I’m sorry, Lord, I was trying to promote myself just now instead of Your glory.” “I’m scared, God.” “Help!” I talk to people I haven’t seen in years, apologizing out loud for that one thing I did back in university. I tell my potted plants, “You guys sit tight there. I’ll be right back.” I’ll never forget the first time I accidentally said “I love you” to the chickens.

I won’t put down what I say to web sites that make it difficult to do things.

I know it’s not just me. You are busted, Reader! I’ll bet you, too, talk to … I don’t know, spoons. Trees. Whatever. It turns out, people need something to talk to. Evidence:

“Elves always wanted to talk to things,” says Treebeard, when speaking of the Elves first “waking up the trees.”

The Tom Hanks character, in Castaway, famously saves his sanity by talking constantly to a volleyball named “Wilson.” When Wilson is washed away, near the end of the movie, he really grieves him. And it turns out that, by getting into daily “conflicts” with the volleyball, he has become better at relating to actual people when he is near them again. This points up how humans are able to anthropomorphize anything. Robots, for example, or rocks.

I have not done this myself, but I’ve heard that many people talk to their dead loved ones… either at their grave, or just throughout the day.

In C.S. Lewis’s novel Perelandra, philologist Ransom finds himself alone on Mars after he had been kidnapped by fellow academics. (In the story, Mars has air and water that are consumable by humans.) Ransom is very alone, very scared, in a very strange situation. As he wanders through the Martian forests, he begins to talk to himself. Not just in the sense of speaking out loud. He actually feels as though “Ransom” is a second person beside him, whom he must comfort, reassure, and consult with. “Don’t worry, Ransom,” he says. “We’ll make it.” It’s actually a creepy scene as we realize how on the edge he is, and even feel our stability slipping with his.

This might be Lewis’s interpretation of the intriguing and spooky Third Man Phenomenon. This is an experience that some people have in survival situations, such as mountain climbing, where they sense another person with them in the situation. It can happen to people who are alone in the wilderness, or in a group. This sense of another person with them is persistent, and so vivid that they may hear a voice. Psychologists, of course, tend to explain this as a hallucination brought on by things like sleep and oxygen deprivation, and/or a coping mechanism comparable to Stockholm Syndrome. (The sleep deprivation theory does raise the question, Why doesn’t this happen to new mothers? At least, not that I know of.) I don’t know what to make of the Third Man, but I will say that he does make me think of the fourth man in the furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

Lewis has another instance of the Third Man phenomenon in his book Pilgrim’s Regress. The narrator, who has been traveling all over the world to find the place he considers paradise, ends up on a perilous cliff, at night, and debates going back to the last house he stopped at, which is definitely not the place he has spent his whole life looking for, but at least it’s safe. At this point a mysterious man appears, prevents him from going back the way he came, and forces him to go on until he is “cliffed out,” at which point the stranger leads him over the perilous part.

“Men go crazy in congregations, but they only come back one by one,” sings Sting. While I like Sting, and while I recognize that cults do exist, as a generalization this line from his song is the inverse of the truth. People really, really need something or someone to talk to. We always want to talk to things.

So, if you’re comfortable sharing, what do you talk to?