We had to draw posters for an in-class project and my progress was not going well. I had given my initial idea to someone else, thinking that I would later think of something else on my own. Unfortunately that thought never came as I looked down at my hastily crayoned fence on my paper while being acutely aware that time was running out.

A projector was displaying a film on the wall about a man navigating through the afterlife. He is greeted by someone who claims to be the devil and proves it by pulling things out of an empty cloth bag. The man is unconvinced as he walks away and when he peers around the corner, we see a long hallway that is lit up from heaven at the other end.

We were sitting in the classroom and across from me was someone that I severely disliked. “I don’t like this”, I said, “but there is just something about your face that compels me to frustrate you as much as possible”. I started to break down into tears as I continued to harass this person who might as well have been a stranger at this point. “Aren’t you devastated?” his friend asked.

We got out of the car just when it started snowing extremely hard. The snow didn’t drift but rather pelted down towards the ground in small fistfuls. “Hey where are you all going?” my father asked as we started walking towards the trees and without much thought. It turned out that we were all just following one another and that no one knew where we were headed before turning around to follow my dad. I could see the buildings that were lit up by spotlights on the other side of the river through the snow. As the trees to the left of us opened up, the snow had started massing together to form balloon-like bubbles around the streetlamp. My brother said, “I’m never going to tell [my brother’s ex] that I painted this” and my mother agreed.

We had been playing some kind of co-op Mario game and for some reason I had been separated from the group at one point. We were in a Japanese garden and I had to solve a problem relating to matching the four cardinal directions to signs on a circular stone.

It was the weekend and we were heading to a lunch with my parents. We sat on a small roller cart on rails to move through the hotel/department store. The three of us sat facing in different directions on the square-shaped cart as it turned while it moved. When we had finally arrived at the restaurant, I noticed that I was the only one left on the cart. “Where did they go?” my mother asked. I thought for a moment before deciding that I would go back and search for them myself.

I ran into my Japanese teacher and she asked me how I had been. I struggled to respond as I sought a way to reply to her in Japanese but no words came out of my mouth. We awkwardly switched to Mandarin which neither of us were entirely fluent in instead of English for some reason which did not help the situation. I later told her in English that I was learning Spanish which was why I was getting everything mixed up in my mind.

I was sitting at a table with a group of people engaged in a conversation. When it came my turn to speak, what came out was a question that wasn’t explicitly directed at anyone. “Why do you never make eye-contact?” someone asked. The conversation quickly switched to how everyone else also noticed that I never make eye-contact when talking to them.

I was picking up two large boxes that were on the street. Knowing that these were my birthday presents, I tried to wrap them without looking as to not ruin the surprise later. They were from my mother and aunt. After I had finished sticking on the last strip of packing tape, I asked if I still needed an invitation to my own birthday party and it turned out that I did.

“I think I have found my purpose” the middle-aged man said wearily. A few days ago he tried his hand at the piano in the bar where he usually worked. He wasn’t a performer but seeing his friend in the crowd dance to his music gave him life. He didn’t seem to notice how he fumbled some of the notes and missed some of the beats but it was glaringly noticeable to the owner when he faltered. “And then it was all nothing” he said. He recounted how he walked out, got into his car and drove to an old mansion by the lake. His disappearance was unnoticed for three days until he showed up back at his house and family soaked from head to toe. He spent the next few days trying to convince his boss that he didn’t try to commit suicide that day as he showed him the direct route he drove in his car. It was undeniable however as he had a record of paying a fee that could’ve only meant that he had gone to the mansion days before.