I was talking to a friend in a coffee shop and we were discussing various features of a Native American language. At some point in time, a woman sitting nearby got rather offended when she mistakenly heard our discussion of a language not having feature x as a suggestion that it wasn’t a real language. She promptly got up and walked out of the cafe before we knew what was happening. I quickly opened the door after she left to shout an apology across the parking lot for any misunderstanding.

My brother asked me and my dad if we went to see the game that he had brought us an extra ticket for. We told him that we didn’t but it turned out that neither did he. My mother insisted that at one point she had slipped alcohol into my cup during dinner once but I denied it for I never recollected tasting the presence of any.

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.