Last weekend, my younger sister and I were sitting up late having a wonderfully sisterly conversation. It was one of those conversations that could have come right out of a Jane Austen novel, if you took away a few hundred years and added several candles.

It was slightly less romantic in other ways too: Iit was past midnight, and neither of us had slept much during the week before. I was lying on the couch, eyes closed, listening to her wrap up her story with a question: “Like, you know those things that are really hard to say, but you just have to say them?”

I was so far from awake that her voice sounded like it was coming from two rooms away, muffled by a quilt, but to assure her that I was still paying attention, I sleepily slurred a reply.

“What, like snails?”

When her laughing woke me up, I rewound the conversation.

I don’t habitually talk about snails. I don’t even habitually think about snails. I have no idea why, in this moment, my subconscious was fixated on those alien-looking gastropods.

I’d broken the first rule of conversing, which is to say words that make sense.

But thank goodness.

Thank goodness for these post-midnight lapsi linguae, which occurred all too often when I stayed up late writing plays. I would be writing a serious, moving scene, and then the darnedest things would come out of my keyboard. I was bothered by the interruptions at first, and then I was not.

When I was too tired to keep my eyes open all the way, my mind made arbitrary connections freely, indiscriminately. I didn’t have the energy to tell myself that I couldn’t write something because it was too crazy, or because it was something I’d never seen before, or because it could never work on a stage. At night, when all of my brainpower was directed towards merely staying conscious, I could evade the cliches which would worm their way into my writing, insistently and inevitably, when I was awake.

And so my plays got bolder, kookier, and less safe: more like plays that I’d be interested in actually seeing.

I get most excited by plays that embrace their theatricality by showing real people doing things you’d probably never see them do in real life. I love when objects appear in surprising context; I love twists on common words and phrases; I love seeing actors doing something ridiculous, over and over.

Theater has always made room for the magical and illogical onstage. Even tightly-constructed Ancient Greek drama managed to get Medea flying in on a dragon-chariot. By the time the mid-20th century rolled around, strange goings-on onstage were doing double-duty as both spectacle and what Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky called “defamiliarization” – an artistic technique of making the familiar strange in order to break the complacency of habitual perception.

Playwright Eugene Ionesco, for example, dramatized fascism by having the entire population of a French village turn into rhinoceroses. Samuel Beckett scripted all kinds of crazy shenanigans, including two plays where people literally just walk around a square in geometric patterns.

More recently, Sarah Ruhl made Eurydice descend to the Underworld via a rainy elevator, where she then met the Lord of the Underworld who was riding a tricycle. And in Jenny Schwartz’s meditation on grief called “God’s Ear,” the Tooth Fairy and GI Joe come to life and sing songs.