I had come back from college with a puppy. Someone had told me that I would not want to have to care about a dog during my sophomore year of college. My parents were out for a few days so I decided to go somewhere on my own. I went to Keelung while carrying the black and white puppy in my hands the whole trip. I thought about sitting by the shore and waiting for the time to pass but I took my time walking around instead. I somehow met my parents there just as they were about to return home. The dog in my hands wasn’t moving and its head was hanging limp.

We had just finished dinner and were about to leave the restaurant. I asked the person in front of me how she had been lately. She questioned if I asked because I was “interested” or just was just looking for someone to talk to. I told her how recently I’ve felt like my cognitive capacities were deteriorating, as if I had “lapses in my thinking”.

My brother and I were wading through a red pool of water. Three white bodies that looked like they were made from wax were lying on the surface of the water. Their facial features were simply crude incisions carved out of the molded head. We walked past them into the next room as my brother said they were “boring”.

I was a subject for a new kind of therapy where I had to sit in front of a screen watching silent videos. All of the videos were single shots of people walking across the screen in the middle of the city. Each video was taken from a different angle and point of view.

Our computers were set up a couple of meters apart and facing towards opposite walls. He told me that he had been playing a lot of Fire Emblem lately along with Final Fantasy. I asked which ones and he replied “the one with the world map”. Confused by what he meant, I pulled up some pictures from Google to make sure we were talking about the same game.

We were traveling to 9 separate “extraction points” around the map in order to deposit seeds to save/get out of the world. One of these points was on someone’s patio and when I sat down I started opening the cardboard boxes that were laying there. One of the boxes contained an “instant bike” that one had to assemble before using. It came with red and blue frames. I then opened a flatter box and all that was inside was some tiles that had a rock pattern on it. We had to leave so I left everything where I found them and walked through a portal.

I was in a TV room and was trying to arrange the mats so I could lay down and sleep. Not matter how I set them, they were always too short and so I got some extra pillows to help. The blinds were down but the afternoon sun gave the room a yellow glow.

We were going to leave for our flight the next morning so we decided to stay up for the whole night. The news on TV was reporting about some people in raincoats who were “just a little warm” and my dad commented on what a joke it was. He then told me to look at a quote printed on the plastic cover of his pudding. It stated how the events in our lives are determined by chance (namely, a “lottery”) and that certain things are simply inescapable.

For whatever reason we were trying to light a large pile of dried grass but was unable to do so by any means. There was a large network of fans installed and they blew so fiercely that it was impossible to even walk against the flow. “I learned about this kind of thing on my birthday” said someone next to me.

It was the last Tuesday of the school year and I was relieved that I had made it. I quickly found out however that we were assigned one more paper and final exam for Hum and that the last paper was due tomorrow. Everyone was already on the quad and the tables were set out for those that were graduating. I looked at the topics I had in the hallway and saw an option was to create a video. For some reason I thought that would be a good idea even though I had no time to do anything. I asked someone next to me what they were writing on and they told me they planned to discuss how filial love was expressed differently in Japanese families based on their own experiences at home.