I was going to be late for the school bus and when I went into the bathroom, I found my dad’s sock in the toilet. My mother’s purse and scarf were in the sink that had two faucets.

I was hiking in the mountains when someone popped out of the bushes and started to lead the way. When the path seemed to reach a dead end, we climbed around a tree and started to descend to the water. “Imagine if we had a lighter” he said. We found large sprouts of garlic on the ground that had ants crawling all over them.

We were in the Halpern* House which was the residence of a man who was alive over 900 years ago. We watched a short presentation of his life story on the screen. What looked like a movie was actually gameplay footage being broadcasted through the projector.

My dad was sitting up on his futon in the corner of the room and stared straight at the wall. He was convinced that his eyesight was going bad and kept complaining about it while facing away from us. My brother told him that he was imagining things and that he should take a rest. There was a CRT television on a small cabinet to the right of my father.

Every time I tried to forcibly open my eyes in an attempt to wake up from the situation, I would find myself in a different scenario.

The news was reporting about how the war was getting worse and that as of today we had entered “a new stage” in our current conflict. It showed footage of a soldier who had both of his limbs on the left mechanically reconstructed walking through a concrete doorway.

My father had been driving us around for a while, looking for a specific restaurant that my mother wanted to eat at. When we got out of the car it was already dark and we passed by what seemed to be a scaled down version of the Taipei 101. When we entered the building next to it, we realized that the restaurant we were being led to by our phone was actually a branch store located in the airport.

I was on the sofa when my father asked my mom if she knew when something they had bought would arrive in the mail. She said she was told the package would arrive today at 9 in the morning. It was already well into the afternoon.

I walked into what appeared to be an empty concrete building and started to climb up the stairs. When I turned past one of the corners, I saw that someone had set up an indoor shooting range and two people were talking at one end. They immediately started shouting and chasing me when I was noticed. I panicked and wasn’t sure when I was going up or down but eventually I climbed a ladder that led to a trapdoor to the roof. The one holding the rifle kept screaming that they wanted me either “dead or dissected”. The other kept asking them why they had bought the kind of gun that they did.

In front of me was a few dozen glass bottles of different oils arranged on a white table. My mom told me that someone had asked if I liked fruit. I would occasionally get flashbacks of replays from season 1 of League of Legends. I picked up a bottle and drank a particularly thick concoction. It was kind of like an extra viscous olive oil.