Thank you for beautiful questions, Penny. Here are my answers.

1. Have you ever gotten lost thinking how it all could just be make-believe?

Yes, all the time, since I was very small, in fact. I often thought that life as I saw it wasn't real and made up my own theories about it. When I was 5 or so, I was eating purplish berries from the juneberry tree bush at our dacha, standing on the rickety bench, and I came up with an idea that when I will grow old, I'll turn around and grow young again, then grow old, and so all those stories about death are nonsense. Another time I was fascinated how I could never look at myself the way other people look at me. I could never get out of my head, so I set upon staring at the mirror and trying to get out of my head. And yet another time when I looked under the bed where my grandmother laid out persimmons on the newspapers to ripen, I thought I saw a sea of them, not just some thirty persimmons, but a whole sea, and I was convinced that my reality was realer than what I saw. I still do it, when I write. I sometimes catch myself thinking that maybe all of it is make-believe, only we each have our own, and I live in mine and show others what it's like through my stories.