Imagine a busy interstate. Say, I-85 running through Atlanta. Five lanes of traffic on either side of a concrete barrier. Every lane is full. Passenger vehicles sit nose to tail with semis, work vans, and limos. Spaghetti Junction soars overhead, an intertwined marvel of human engineering. It's summer. The asphalt is scorching hot to the touch and radiates visible heat under the cars.

Billboards line the highway, blaring a different movie on each screen. King Kong holds Fay Wray in his hairy grip as he scales the Empire State Building. Ferris and Cameron accidentally wreck Cameron's father's prized Spyder after a day spent romping through Chicago. Jerry defeats Tom in yet another cat-and-mouse chase, Ripley faces down the Queen in a corporate dystopia, and on and on, as far as the eye can see in either direction.

Books are piled everywhere, their pages fluttering. Old books with gilted spines, sombor books in blue and silver lettering, children's books with vintage images of classic characters imprinted on their faces. They spill out of open windows, serve as rectangular wheels for a book mobile tucked between Pharaoh's chariot and Cinderella's magical pumpkin carriage.

Above, hawks and pterodactyls soar with airplanes around gray-lined stratocumulus clouds. The sun and the moon dance among the planets, and starships roar toward distant galaxies, a symphony of movement among the lines and charts of mathematical formulae.

Speaking of symphonies, there's one over there, set up beside an accident in which a werewolf rear-ended a limo with black-tinted windows. The driver bears the mark of a vampire's servant. No, her master cannot come out to speak with the officer. He's allergic to sunlight.

The conductor, absorbed in the accident's byplay, miscues the brass section, and so the symphony must start over, from the beginning of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherezade, Opus 35, movement 1. As the violins retune their strings, a wave of frothing water rushes down the dividing lane of the interstate, carrying Sinbad in his wooden ship. Vaslav Nijinsky weaves sinuously through traffic, his body painted gold as he eroticizes the music to which he dances.

Below, the earth is transparent, each of its layers clearly visible. The center of the planet is a molten core surrounding a temporal zone in which dinosaurs stroll along tropical, pre-historic plains. Nearer to the surface, embedded fossils come with their own interactive thought bubbles detailing the lives of the creatures so memorialized. A Neanderthal crafts an atl-atl some meters below a woman sowing the first seeds, and a Minoan slave girl carries her mistress's children through an ornately decorated palace.

Add in layers of sound. The honk of horns as drivers become irritated by the heat, idling engines stressed by maxed out air conditioners, the squawk of a pterodactyl as it spots a herd of rabbits scampering into the cool shade cast by an overpass, the sympony warring with the soundtracks of each movie, Sinbad shouting orders to his crew above the roar of the ocean. From a 4Runner drifts Don Henley's "The Boys of Summer." Inspired by the music, drivers in adjacent vehicles turn up their radios, blaring Godsmack, The Wailin' Jennys, Nora Jones, Chuck Berry, and Mary Chapin Carpenter. A semi driver cuts his engine, enters the trailer, and plays Lent et douloureux on a baby grand tucked into the back.

Now the other senses. The skin-singing heat, broken only by the breeze of a giant eagle's wings. The stench of vehicle exhaust mingling with the odor of fur and feathers and the sweet bloom of the honeysuckle crawling up the concrete divider. The owner of a food truck passes out plates of barbecue and slaw as woodsy smoke drifts away from his smoker.

The scene constantly changes, morphing as each tableau comes into focus. Satie sits down at the piano, picking up the second of his Gymnopedies, where the semi driver left off. Onscreen, Ripley steps into a yellow mech and moves supplies around with the mechanical arms. The werewolf, hangry after his run-in with the vampire's pet, snags one of the rabbits and bites its head off, spewing hot, red blood onto the officer, who is busy writing a citation on the backs of vividly hued tarot cards. Superman flies into view and captures a plummeting 747 just before it crash lands atop a minivan filled with half a dozen kindergartners on their way to soccer practice.

Einstien shakes his shaggy head and laughs.

Now imagine you're standing in the center off all this, surrounded by more sights and sounds and energy, more chaos and vibrant color, than you can absorb, watching as new information pops into the scene, joining the already overloaded stage, and different parts of the scenery coalesce into new shapes and sounds and words scrawled across the whole by an unseen hand.

This is my brain. Welcome.