Our family was once again discussing what kinds of clothes I should wear. My parents were recommending that I wear “了解裤” (pants of understanding???) which were unisex briefs but were only sold in the women’s sections of stores.

I was playing a Zelda game on the Wii and was stuck at a certain boss. The boss was made out of three colorful geometric blocks with movement that resembled a knight on a horse. In order to defeat it, you had to aim and time throws at a PokeGo-esque target three consecutive times. If you got too close, you instantly died as you get eaten.

I was passing a security checkpoint for the library when I was randomly selected to have my bags searched. I tried to not appear nervous because my brother had previously told me to pack a car battery in my bag for him. In order to pass through the game I had to play a game where my objective was to stop a metal ball from rolling to the bottom of the wooden maze board by placing rooks and green Mentos mints on a platform above it. As the ball passed the obstacles, they would tip over with a chance of obstructing its path. My brother wasn’t interested in watching so he went on ahead into the library. Sometimes the Mentos would transform into various figures and jump towards the metal ball in an attempt to catch it.

I had slept through an exam that apparently no one else had shown up for either. I walked out of my bedroom and wanted to reschedule the exam to take somewhere else.

It was up to the two of us to stop the bomb set up in the warehouse. They wanted the password to control the drone but we refused to negotiate with them. I asked how people could remember their customers from 7 weeks ago, let alone 70 days. After an initial struggle, the bomb fell and smashed onto the cement below us but the time kept on ticking. The criminals let open a gas valve and had finished dousing the place in gasoline. One of them lit a stick of dynamite which quickly blew up in his hand.

We were playing a remastered version of Diablo 2 in the computer lab. I was kneeling on the floor in front of the desk because I couldn’t find a chair. As a result, I had a hard time seeing the top half of the screen due to the glare from the ceiling lights. I was somewhere in the middle of Act 3 and was about to die to a large pack of fetishes. For some reason up until now I had set all of my skills to auto-cast and had a mess of a build with three primary damage spells (“Lightning Strike, Blood Pact, Ice Nova). My survivability went up immensely when I started to hit and run instead of standing around.

We were standing on our hospital beds in the courtyard in the middle of the night. Someone bragged about stealing a sheet curtain and I mocked him, calling him a “master stealer”. “What time does fourth grade begin?” he then asked but was quickly drowned out by someone else shouting. We sat down in our beds to watch the first season of Friends but for some reason the opening credits had a different song. “Everything was so happy back then” someone commented.

I watched as the colorfully painted house on the beach gently leaned to the side until it completely tipped over like an uprooted tree. I picked up what seemed to be a boat cut in half and the man sitting by the water asked if I was sailing somewhere. “I thought about it” I said, before turning back and telling my father that the house had fallen over.

We were playing a team-based procedural escape game and for some reason we started inside of a flooded basement. “Are we meant to start underwater?” someone asked. Apparently there was a bug in our version where players would spawn in locations without breathable air.

We were in an underpass and there was graffiti on the wall across from me with the text “I think Bernie is going to lose. I’m worried” in a bubble above of a portrait of the senator. “Seems like things changed after yesterday’s Pokemon stream” said someone walking down the stairs on the right. To the left and on the opposite wall were portals named “teleportation streams”.