This book consists of two stories. The first story is a sort of poetry travel log documenting the places I went during hallucinatory episodes that occurred on an almost daily basis throughout the spring, summer, and early autumn of 2025, when I was nineteen years old. Some of those places were ethereal and wondrous. Others were prisons I wasn't always alone in. Also included in this story are poems and vignettes on the heartache and thoughts of self-harm and self-destruction that my episodes and their byproduct memory loss left in their wake. Apparently, my exact symptoms are very rare. I think that rareness, along with the fact that the memory loss aspect creates an unreliable narrator, makes this sort of abstract retelling interesting. The second story is a string of semi-connected thoughts on things I care about and how I have come to think of them with a mind that is newly mine again, namely people, nature and the philosophies around it, the American West, and other topics. The wildernesses of Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah have always been sources of peace and inspiration for me and so feature prominently.

My first published poetry collection, Rebuilding Songs, was a ridiculous, unfiltered, deeply flawed work I wrote and released while very unwell and have since made unavailable for purchase. Lullabies exists to balance out Songs, to be deliberate and polished in ways its predecessor could never have been capable of, and to lay these stark days to rest.