I was playing a TCG that somewhat resembled Magic the Gathering. However, the play space also featured a grid where you could place down your creatures which was important because they would each have different ranges and active areas. Units would automatically attack each other when certain conditions were met, mostly satisfied by positioning. After playing a card, an action could be spent to draw a card, return a card to the deck, or to retrieve a card from the field.

I opened my eyes to find myself hunched over on my desk in front of the computer screen. Classmates from middle school were sitting in front of and directly to the left of me. I figured something was wrong almost immediately and held my nose to check if I was dreaming. Apparently we were sitting in a class about costume design for theater productions and I had woken up during the intermission. I stood up to go to the restroom until I realized I didn’t need it partway down the hallway. I turned around to get back to class. When I walked through the door I felt something blowing into my left ear even though nothing was there. I figured it must be something from outside of the dream and plugged it up with my index finger.

I found myself wandering and lost inside of what seemed to be some kind of administrative building. I spotted an acquaintance from college among the sea of faces and caught up to him on the stairs to ask him a question.

I was watching a trailer for an anime that featured girls transforming and dueling on top of large spinning tops. However they seemed to get tired before actually settling anything. Apparently it was a spin-off series of Revue Starlight and two seasons were already out. Kagura Hikari narrated over the trailer in unaccented English.

I was attending a game jam and one of the restrictions for the current jam was that we couldn’t use any audio that was created in the last 15 years. Immediately someone asked what the most annoying song from 2008 was. I walked out the door as people prepared to watch a movie.

I walked out of the classroom where everyone was clicking away in front of their screens and passed a BestBuy in the hallway. From the window display it looked like the store had just opened and wasn’t fully stocked yet. I was lucid by about this point and walked down to the running track. There were some (unmanned) stalls selling trinkets around the edge of the field. I figured it was about time to get back to class. I closed my eyes and tried my best to visualize the room in an attempt to teleport but couldn’t manage to get it to work. I decided to run instead but my legs now felt very heavy.

I was in the world of Abiotic Factor with my friends and we had gotten slightly split up in the mall. A Reaper would spawn in one of the dark corners of an unlit furniture store.

I had read about a recent trend of people selling titles for extremely small areas of land. Transactions were mostly being done through an app with a frontier/Wild West aesthetic. Selling titles was framed as “Driv[ing] Evil” out. Prices were at an all time high and no one wanted to miss out. In our house was a parcel the size of a parked car in the garage and one the size of a dining table in our living room. I sold them off with a click until I realized that the living room land belonged to “one of the fun ones”.

I was traveling between bases in Abiotic Factor when I was cornered by a security bot in one of the doorways. It was trying to break into our small kitchen and I thought that maybe it was time to just teleport back to our main base.

I was asked if I wanted to shoot a video to help promote a halloween event for Mahjong Soul. I accepted it without much thought but quickly got overwhelmed as I wasn’t given much guidance beyond a script and a group of people who’d been chosen to act out whatever skit they had given us. I was simultaneously director, cinematographer, and potentially editor on a project with a rapidly approaching deadline. We were supposed to be filming at this very moment in the exceedingly noisy room but I was still reading over the script for the very first time. The actors sat around looking aimlessly while I procrastinated by silently thinking about the best delivery for the lines. Before I knew it, time was up. And I had no footage.