I work at an art camp, making t-shirts with kids. A couple days ago, I found myself standing in a triangle with campers from the oldest group (birth year estimate: 2006). One was wearing a blue t-shirt, the other, blue everything, and there was a bright blue marker in my hand. When I relayed this observation to the kids, I expected it to be one of those “disconnect” moments where they look at me with true, unaffected confusion and, scatter away. Instead their wide eyes met mine with a hint of quizzicality but mostly intrigue.

The blue t-shirt kid looked at his chest and saw a yellow figure amidst the blue. “Okay, listen,” he said, “yellow has six letters. Blue has four. Six divided by half of four is three. Illuminati confirmed.”

I was in awe. Blue t-shirt kid understood that when I acknowledged our shared blueness, I was subtly suggesting that there is some great mystery behind this. And he embraced my suggestion of mystery and tried to explain it.

I have since found out that “Illuminati confirmed” is an internet phenomenon wherein each “confirmation” consists of a different set of tangentially related ideas. But I will resist the urge to discredit this “game” as a piece of electronic trash-ola. The game gives kids a symbol, “Illuminati,” to which they can attach everything they see as mysterious or unexplained. Further, it teaches them that the unexplained lives inside of them, and manifests itself in imagination and unconscious connections.

“What do you think the Illuminati is?” I asked him. His eyes leaned up to the right for a minute as he pondered this with a toothy smile.

“See, that’s the problem. We don’t really know,” he said with a shrug and a laugh. “It involves men in black and helicopters.”

The Illuminati game is one possibility for children to explore areas of mystery. It is like religion, and each set of tangents and ideas makes up the doctrine. Fundamentally though it is defined by following the intuitive connections of the mind and building them into a pseudo-logical structure, ending in “three.”

Kids don’t need this structure -- for example, blue-everything kid understood my hint at universal mystery, too, and had her own ideas of what this mystery held. She jumped into her own, even longer set of connections, starting with stamps on t-shirts and ending with Russian soldiers.

These kids were playing games of connectivity and creativity. During an age where we assume all young people are prematurely absorbed in iMessage and Pokemon Go and we seem to be constantly proven right, it’s important to remember that kids have insane capabilities for imagination and connecting ideas. The spontaneous spewing they do reminds me of Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who saw recording the fluxes of the mind as a window into reality.