I was watching a musical that pulled a series of fake-out endings towards the end of the show. At first it was a relatively depressing story about some children, but then the epilogue showed a happy ending. Then moments later it was revealed that the entire thing had been a dream of the main character, rendering both the despair and happy endings as mere figments of imagination. I thought about the metanarrative of how either “endings” would have been preferable to the one that we got.

The three of us were packing our belongings in the middle of a grassy field. The two out of the three of us had been sent back to medieval times from the “future” while the last person was oblivious to our origins. I asked my partner what she thought of our situation. She actually felt quite good, as we still had the ability to request access to things from the present day. I agreed as I looked at my phone from 2014.

We were in some kind of theme park for our class trip and everyone was sitting on a glider that was flying over the hill. I looked to my right to see that people were falling forwards one by one to the ground below which quickly destabilized our ride as the glider became unbalanced.

I received a message on Discord from a friend updating me on her trip home. She said she felt a lot less lonely than she had expected, and that it was actually a little overwhelming. She sent me a short clip of a car driving out of a parking lot but everything beyond the parking lot itself looked like it was procedurally generated.

I was getting breakfast at the snack bar near the entrance of our school. I had gotten the daily special which was some granola topped with yogurt and fruit. I finished eating right before classes were about to begin as trucks started unloading at the front gate. I had to be careful not to trip over the various ramps and traffic cones as I made my way to class.

I was watching the Tatami Galaxy projected onto a black curtain in a dark room. It was getting late go I decided to pause the episode and stop for the night when the credits started rolling. I walked through the curtains into the kitchen which still had its lights on. When I came out of the restroom, I saw that my uncle had already woken up.

I was traversing across a vast desert under the night sky in Deep Rock Galactic. I told my friend that I was checking out an abandoned base while he worked somewhere else. I was in an open area deep within the fortress when I suddenly found myself surrounded by glowing red visors from all directions. I dashed out of there as everyone started shooting lasers.

I was lining up in a Hawaiian restaurant named “Bai Hinas” and I spent most of my time looking at the menu. I still didn’t know what I wanted to get when I got to the front of the line. Not wanting to hold up the line any longer, I quickly chose the chicken leg rice with teriyaki sauce. I had spent so much of my attention thinking about what to order that I forgot to say that I wanted it for takeout until it was already being served on a plate. Not wanting to make a big deal out of it, I decided to sit down and dine in instead.

We were walking down a long set of wooden stairs in the mountains until we got to a parking lot and rest area. My coworker had to leave for work, while a friend was asking me questions about what we did. It was now my responsibility to show her around.

It was right about lunch time and we had a multi-level cafeteria not far from the cabins. I walked up to the third floor and there was a butcher displaying a selection of meats on the counter. I picked out a beef shank and waited until someone behind the display noticed me. “Do you want that on the grill?” she asked.

I was looking at apartments in a college town even though I wasn’t intending to continue my education. I was worried about how I was supposed to find new friends. My dad warned against approaching academia. I asked him why - after all there may still be individual courses that I wanted to take.