The two of us were laying down in adjacent dental chairs while a third was recounting a story about how to fake relations with other people. They mentioned a specific book in their narrative which just happened to be the same book that was on the small desk beside us. It had a red cover with gold lettering.

I was in a virtual reality simulation and there was an animation demo across the water from me. It looked like something made in Source Filmmaker and I greatly appreciated the fluidity of motion that went into it.

We were talking about the absurdity of our deadlines as they were set by a larger company that we worked for. They were essentially artificial deadlines and were only there to give the illusion of “progress”.

We walked into a Chinese restaurant that we had previously stopped by and reserved a spot for. When we sat down at the table, we were handed a tablet to communicate. Instead of using words and sounds, we used “concepts” and images to get our ideas across. Someone said it was too bad that we didn’t know what time all the other customers in the restaurant sat down.

I had woken up by the side of a busy road without a clue of how I had gotten there. Apparently I was about to miss the departure of a trip for the Columbia River Gorge* but I still had to get back home before I could meet up with the other people. I was going to cross the road but I hesitated as I was unsure if I was supposed to pick up the rug that I was sleeping on along with me for I couldn’t tell if it was mine or not. I eventually decided to leave it and quickly ran across the street. When I got into the apartment building, I made too many right turns and ended up at the security desk instead of the elevator. Apparently they had just recently changed the placement of the elevator. “I’m still getting it wrong all the time” the security guard on duty assured me.

I was running around with a knife out fully believing that I was merely in a video game with zombies. The sluggish responses and the stat tracking on my weapons gave it away. However as it got darker, everything became more vivid and animated. Some people “gave up [their] patriotism for survival”, whatever that meant. We lost contact with each other until nighttime when we were all being thrown into a pile in front of a campfire. “You let us down!” someone shouted at me as I was dragged next to them.

I was attending a lecture about a book that a friend had written. However she wasn’t the one that was going to be talk about her own book. The book itself was a collection of modern art exploring the alternative scenarios concerning Helen’s departure from Sparta. It featured a green cover with a slightly tilted recursive pattern.

We were walking away from the bus and the group of people were feeling particularly smug for they had redirected the blame of something they did to some random bystander. There were people working in ditches around highly stacked mounds of dirt. We walked to a tea house and someone commented on my long strides - they said how it made us look like a part of a gang. I immediately resumed a regular posture.

Someone was talking about their International Relations class and how they were now on the topic of “legitimacy”. I asked them if that was about monarchies and such and they responded by raising up a map of the borders on the British Isles during the middle ages.

I was pushing a large plastic container up and down the road that wound around the mountain. Inside of this container were 3 more containers of increasingly smaller sizes fitted within the last. Inside of the smallest box was a bag of dirt as well as some spare lids. I was around the bus stop when my mouth started to feel incredibly dry. It only took a few seconds before my entire lower jaw had numbed. When I raised my hands to my mouth, I realized that it was filled with toilet paper. I could no longer breathe as I puled out an endless strand of toilet paper from my mouth. I was on the verge of passing out through suffocation.