Go ahead. Try this experiment in sensory imagination. It will certainly be easier if first you imagine an up-close visual image of the orange -- fresh cut and glistening with juice.

So what happened? Did you do it? Some individuals are good at this. Immediately their heads fill with a sweet orange aroma and their mouths water.

For others, nothing happens. They see a flickering orange floating there in the mind's eye, sterile, and worst of all, unsniffable.

Considering the paltry smelling equipment we upright bipeds have at our disposal, that's understandable. Alas, the human nose, tiny and up in the air as it is, is all that remains of a once glorious mammalian snout. And what little we do smell (compared to Buddy, the President's new pooch, for example) we're lucky to be able to imagine later on at all.

Nevertheless, if you did imagine a sweet orange aroma and your mouth watered, you just created what for the purposes of this article I'll call a mental image. More specifically, an olfactory image. It doesn't look like

something, however. It smells like something, for just a moment, in consciousness, then it disappears.

It is pure information.

You imagined it.

One of your sensory imaginations is at work.

If you're a professional wine taster or perfumer, imaginary aromas skewing your results will get you in trouble. But if you're a parent looking into yourself to find bedtime stories for your child, these will-o-the-wisp aromas can be gateways.

Gateways into the realm of story.

For instance, what aromas, as a child, did you love the most? When you recall one, if you're like most people, the aroma will unlock nearby memories. You might encounter a flood of recollections. Any one might make a good true story from Mom's or Dad's life to share.

Or, by combining our orange aroma with, let's say, other sense images, you may end up starting a story about a three ton orange in your backyard that attracted all your neighbors and their juicers, or something silly like that. With garden trowels they dig out quivering orange chunks. Imagine, the whirring of a hundred juicers. What chaos would ensue! Everything would end up terribly sticky.

And what clever child, who might just happen to be yours, would figure out a way to save the day?

From there, this bedtime story could go anywhere.