When I was little, I wanted an imaginary friend. I had a Little Golden Book about a lamb who had an imaginary friend, and I thought this would be very handy when I was stuck playing by myself. But try as I might, I never did develop a convincing invisible companion.

My daughter and son both had imaginary friends. Kerry, around the age of three, had a husband named Jonah and 10 kids, most of whom were named Stinky, but one was named Salty. They lived in San Francisco for a while, then they moved to San Jose and Jonah opened a sandwich shop. Jonah suffered an unfortunate death from pneumonia when Kerry developed a crush on a three-year-old named Brian. At the age of two, Sean had Dahlilly. Dahlilly was a very tall angel with orange wings and hair and blue eyes. His favorite food was Chicken McNuggets. Dahlilly eventually turned into a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and disappeared soon after, presumably due to personality disorder.

I may not have had an imaginary friend, but I did have imaginary sparkles. Like many kids, I was afraid of the dark, so I kept my door open halfway so that the hall light would dispel the monsters. When the sparkles began I was about six years old. I was lying in bed when I noticed some sort of dust drifting slowly and gently through the half-open bedroom door and spreading throughout my darkened room. In the light from the hallway, they looked like dust motes in a sunbeam. As these motes floated into the darker areas of my room, they looked like infinitesimal points of colored light. Soon, my room was filled with tiny sparkles swimming lazily around my room on unseen currents of air. They were as silent as the stars.

I was alarmed. I had never seen this before, I had never heard anyone talk about anything like this, and I was seriously frightened. I ran downstairs to see my parents, who, predictably, told me I had been having a nightmare.

It was not a nightmare; I had been wide awake. But even at the tender age of six, I intuitively knew that insisting otherwise was a waste of my time. So I trudged back upstairs to my bedroom to face whatever fate awaited me, and was relieved to find that the sparkles had disappeared.

As soon as I went to bed and turned out the light, they drifted in again, tumbling in slow motion and twinkling like incredibly tiny Christmas tree lights—thousands upon thousands of them filling my entire room. That night, I hid my head under the covers, which was my best and only defense against the unknown.

The sparkles came back every night after that. I decided they were benign and friendly things. Maybe it was fairy dust, or the sand that the sandman brought. Or perhaps the sparkles were fairies themselves. I didn’t understand what they were, but I grew to welcome them and looked forward to seeing them every night. The cloud of little lights felt like a magical protection. I never mentioned them to my parents again. I think I casually asked one or two friends if they saw sparkles at night to see if I was the only one. I was the only one.

My parents sent me to boarding school when I was 14. I wondered if the sparkles would follow me to the school. They didn’t. When I came home for Thanksgiving, no sparkles drifted into my room, that night or any other.

I missed them. Perhaps I had outgrown my need for their magical defense. Perhaps it was a function of change in a growing brain. I don’t know.

I suppose the sparkles were a recurring hallucination. Perhaps they were a way to cope with growing up in a difficult family situation. However imaginary they may have been, they were real to me, a mystical defense, a security blanket, a pretty light show that soothed me to sleep.

I still wish the sparkles would come back. They were better than any old imaginary friend.