I have this habit of making up characters’ back story or motivation in my head, and then watching their shows with that filter in place. I can’t help it. It sticks. A great example of viewers who have done this in the past would be X-Files Mulder/Scully ‘shippers who speculated that the duo canoodled in the elevator scene in “Paper Clip” during season three. It was completely plausible; we just never saw it!

Here are five similar scenarios that I have lodged in my noggin:

1. GH’s Jax and Carly are Morgan’s biological parents; they just don’t remember, or refuse to acknowledge, the possibility. It’s totally feasible, since the 2003 scene in which Carly went to tell Jax she saw Brenda and Sonny kissing on the pier was never shown. All we know is that Carly was later drugged by Faith Rosco’s stooge and woke up in bed with Ric. Who’s to say that she and Jax didn’t get totally plastered and have a little revenge sex they never talk about?

2. Y&R’s Rafe puts up with Billy’s shenanigans because they’ve slept together. Rafe and Billy have a great friendship, proving that a gay guy and a straight guy can be BFFs. But I can’t help it: Considering what a manwhore Billy is, I just picture them drinking a lot of Jaeger their junior year in college and experimenting a little. Billy sleeps with everything that moves, and I think Rafe wouldn’t judge if he wanted to give it a try! And it was years ago, they’ve both gotten past it, but it’s always there as this thing that keeps Rafe loyal to his baby-buying train wreck of a pal.

3. Simon came back for Katie after the last episode of ATWT. I have this unshakable belief that after Katie and Chris shut the door behind Luke, there was a knock and she opened it thinking Luke had forgotten something. But, no, it was just Simon…standing there all wonderful and soulmate-y. A reunion wouldn’t be immediate, they’d both have to work for it, but it would definitely happen!

4. Justified‘s Boyd has been in love with Raylan since they worked in the mines together.Boyd and Raylan pretty much imbue the classic black hat/white hat cowboy code of honor. There’s this rich, poetic bond between them, and I honestly see it as a kind of romance. They both kill people without blinking and, yet, have avoided offing one another. I think it’s because there’s a love there — whether it’s brotherly, sexy, or something in between! Heck, even Miz Johnson from the mining company noted their tale “sounds like a love story.”

5. As Belinda Carlise says, “Heaven is a place on Earth.” I came up with this last week, while trying to reconcile Dixie’s return to AMC and the Roger Howarth’s Todd conundrum playing out on OLTL. What if the “white light” heaven we’ve seen on both of those shows is actually a holding facility run by a consortium of ABC soap supervillains? Dixie, Jesse, Zach and Todd’s disappearances… it all traces back to a grand scheme plotted by the likes of Proteus, Helena Cassadine, Cesar Faison and Carlo Hesser. The characters are held captive, and when their loved ones “see” them it’s really a high-level shared hallucination. Sort of soap opera meets The Matrix! It certainly makes more sense than everybody actually dying onscreen and magically returning, right?