I walked out of the classroom where everyone was clicking away in front of their screens and passed a BestBuy in the hallway. From the window display it looked like the store had just opened and wasn’t fully stocked yet. I was lucid by about this point and walked down to the running track. There were some (unmanned) stalls selling trinkets around the edge of the field. I figured it was about time to get back to class. I closed my eyes and tried my best to visualize the room in an attempt to teleport but couldn’t manage to get it to work. I decided to run instead but my legs now felt very heavy.

I was in the world of Abiotic Factor with my friends and we had gotten slightly split up in the mall. A Reaper would spawn in one of the dark corners of an unlit furniture store.

I had read about a recent trend of people selling titles for extremely small areas of land. Transactions were mostly being done through an app with a frontier/Wild West aesthetic. Selling titles was framed as “Driv[ing] Evil” out. Prices were at an all time high and no one wanted to miss out. In our house was a parcel the size of a parked car in the garage and one the size of a dining table in our living room. I sold them off with a click until I realized that the living room land belonged to “one of the fun ones”.

I was traveling between bases in Abiotic Factor when I was cornered by a security bot in one of the doorways. It was trying to break into our small kitchen and I thought that maybe it was time to just teleport back to our main base.

I was asked if I wanted to shoot a video to help promote a halloween event for Mahjong Soul. I accepted it without much thought but quickly got overwhelmed as I wasn’t given much guidance beyond a script and a group of people who’d been chosen to act out whatever skit they had given us. I was simultaneously director, cinematographer, and potentially editor on a project with a rapidly approaching deadline. We were supposed to be filming at this very moment in the exceedingly noisy room but I was still reading over the script for the very first time. The actors sat around looking aimlessly while I procrastinated by silently thinking about the best delivery for the lines. Before I knew it, time was up. And I had no footage.

The cafeteria line that I was waiting in split into two in front of me so I arbitrarily chose the branch on the right. This happened to be the line for desserts so I picked out an ice cream before circling back to the end of the line.

I was in a school science lab and we were tightening vises that were clamped onto the tables. I tried to keep my distance as I was afraid they might suddenly blow up from the pressure.

We were scaling a near vertical cliff face that also resembled a highway up the side of an erupting volcano. Molten rock and debris were raining down on us as we tried to crawl our way up the smooth rock. What can only be described as a magma worm was also weaving in and out of the ground.

I woke up not knowing where I was or what I was doing. It was still night out. My body felt sore and kind of gross. I felt ashamed of the possibilities. I walked out of the room and collapsed onto the couch in the unlit living room. On the way there I passed by a motion sensor that played a cat meowing sound while a blue LED blinked. It felt like it was my brother’s place but the actual rooms were completely foreign to me.

I was on the bus ride home but was afraid of missing my stop because I kept dozing off. Eventually what I feared had come to pass as I woke up to the bus turning onto an unfamiliar street. Fortunately however, the driver decided to make a U-turn in the middle of the road so they could explain in detail how bus stops worked. I was a bit confused why all of the stop names differed not only from my memory but also how they were written. It turned out that they were not reading them out in English.