I was working a party with my coworkers. Aidan was working too. Our jobs were to like, help set up, make drinks, people could come to us for help, etc. For this particular party, the workers were allowed to bring their own guests. I didn't bring anyone. The party took place in multiple locations, one of the locations was called “The Fishbowl” or something. It was inside this modern building. To get to it, you went on these conveyor belt things that went around in a circle. The club was downstairs, beneath the conveyor belts, so to get in you had to stand over, like, a hole in the ground and fall into it, as if you were on a giant “children's shape-block box.”

Anyway, we were getting ready for the party. Setting up. I was doing something when R. came over and said something to me. I responded to him, but then his tone changed and I heard women's voices. I turned around and saw some girls he'd invited to the party. They were pretty, like they just looked very normie college girl, only like how a college girl would look a few years post graduation. I felt sad. They all left. I wished I'd've invited someone.

Then a group of kids nearby asked me to look at one of their friends' outfits and tell them if it had a pocket. The dude was wearing a Jake from Adventure Time costume. I said, “yes, there's a pocket on the right sleeve,” but only after going back and forth on my answer for a while.

Then somehow I was lying in bed with Mom. We were just chilling, I was on my phone. I knew I was supposed to be working, and that the party was the busiest we'd had yet, but I didn't want to do anything, so I sat in bed. I got a message from R. telling me to go to The Fishbowl to help him with something. I responded something about killing myself, something dramatic. I didn't think R. was going to read it, though. I thought it was a practice message or something—I don't know what I thought it was, but I didn't think it was going to actually be delivered. He responded with something funny. Something that used asterisks to indicate an action, like “ok, sorry *leaves*” or something like that. I felt embarrassed.

Finally, I got off my ass and went back to the party to help. I passed Aidan. She was DJing. I said to her, “I didn't know you were working here, I was going to invite you!” I wanted to talk, but she was busy and I was in a rush, so we didn't have time. I kept going toward “The Fishbowl.” I walked up a big staircase that led to the conveyor belts (which led to the holes in the ground that allowed entrance to The Fishbowl). On that staircase, I passed Katarina and some girls who were homeless.

I was slightly scared of getting down to The Fishbowl—of going in the hole—but I did it anyway. A washer was fastened around my neck and I dropped into water below, not exactly painful, but not gentle. As I floated in the water, I thought of some statistic about people getting injured in these “alternate elevators.” It was something concerning, like 3/10 people get injured while dropping down, but they still implement them in buildings, for whatever reason.

I was standing in a cafeteria line with Ava and a few others. Out of malicious impulse, in front of everyone I mention that Ava's chest is “so flat” then show off mine. This makes her seethe. Then she comes to the lunch table we're sitting at a little bit later with a friend and I tell her friend that she has ugly feet. A guy we're sitting by does a backflip off a bench and narrowly misses breaking his neck.

Then I'm walking with Aidan and she works at a lemonade place and she's telling me how she might want to transfer to a different lemonade place, a Somalian one near me, and I tell her about how I used to tutor Somalian people in English. I tell her that she could probably learn Somali fairly easily, that they use the Latin alphabet, so it's “not hard like Chinese.”

Julia let a live raccoon into our house and then Lola killed it. We had other wild animals running round the house too.

Having sex with a guy. I go to give him a blowjob and he's actually a girl.

[name] shits in the Best Buy. We have to go to customer services.

I was on a boat. I was a judge for... I don't even know what. I would have contestants (I guess that's what you'd call them) come over to this area with me where they'd show me how high their cat can jump. So, I was over in this corner with a lady and she was trying to get her cat to hop over me, or show me how high it can jump, because then she wins something.

Then on the same boat, I run into another “[last name]” family. We're all sitting with our backs against a pane of glass on the side of the boat—meaning it faces the ocean. I'm scared the wall is going to give out, so I beg everyone to lean forward. They think I'm overreacting. I lean forward, regardless.

I'm at a restaurant with the family: Cindy, Jim, Pops, Catherine, Nick, Charlie, Julia, Mom. Julia's nipples are showing through her shirt as we're walking in, toward the table. I'm embarrassed about this. Once we're seated, Pops comes over and sits by me, to argue about the vaccine, because Mom sent him down to do so.

I was at a get together with Victoria, Dad, and Dad's side of the family. We were in Kate's house, in her living room. I was being very cruel to Victoria and Dad, saying mean things and mocking them. Grandpa didn't like me doing that. He said something to me that I didn't quite comprehend. It was sort of cryptic, like some anecdote and rhetorical question meaning to dissuade me from bullying Dad and Victoria further. Grandma also didn't approve of my behavior. Afterward, I was relaying what had happened to Mom and she took Grandpa's side. I quipped back that she'd “only ever defend what he does in a dream.”

At some point, (either before or after the get-together, I can't remember), I was at a table with some people and they were looking at my art. They were complimenting me. I kept replying with “I'm really not that good.” They asked me if I'd like a job as an artist and again I replied that I wasn't very good. A man at the table asked me if I'd like to work with him. He was a manga artist and he wanted me to be a proofreader.

In class, Prof. Hejhal gave us an assignment. I had barely started working on it when he called time and started collecting them. Apparently it was a test, but I hadn't realized that. I hadn't even finished a single problem on it. I said something like, “I failed it. I'm going to be the one kid in this class with an F.” Prof. Hejhal replied something like, “yeah, well then something needs to be fixed” or “you need to fix something”—something to that extent. I laid down on the floor and started crying. A kid from the table I had formerly been sitting at exclaimed, “I got one wrong!” I told him to shut up and that I had it worse. Then he asked to see my hand. I was puzzled as to why he wanted to and didn't respond right away. He seemed bothered by that.

I was in a big classroom, like a gymnasium with long folding tables. I was tutoring Kendell Jenner in trigonometry. We walked over to this big whiteboard where she was to display her answer to the question we were working on, but there was no space, so we sat back down. When class was over, I ran into this professor who taught English to people who were “really dumb” or something. He explained this to me as I walked with him from the math classroom to the building his class was held in. He was asking for volunteers to help him with the class. I said I'd help, but then, right before we got to the building, I asked how long the class was and he said two hours, which was just too long for me, so I apologized and left.

I am sitting at a table with Henry S., “tall Adam” from highschool, and Kate. I am eating cream cheese wontons, breadsticks, and possibly a third food item that someone had bought for us. We're waiting for a pizza to arrive. A pizza from Pizza Hut. We sit there from 3:30-6pm. 6 was supposed to be the latest the pizza might arrive, but it still hadn't, so they make me go to the restaurant to ask about it.

I go to the restaurant next door to Pizza Hut. I begin my spiel, “the pizza never came...” but then I realize it's the wrong restaurant, so I apologize. The employees are nice and say that pizza not arriving is a recurring problem for the Pizza Hut, so people have done the same thing as me before.

Then I go over to the Pizza Hut. I walk in and no one is working. All the chefs are sitting along this bar. The worker girls are also sitting at the bar, eating and giggling. They give me these uninviting looks then just ignore me. Really bizarre energy. Finally, I work up courage and ask to speak to someone. I talk about the pizza not arriving. I think it's Jack F. who I'm speaking with, I didn't know he worked there. He gets the guys in the back to make me another pizza, but as I see them starting I say something like, “don't spit on the pizza, please!” or something neurotic like that. They look at me weird and I think to myself I've fucked it all up, again.

They start throwing the ball of dough around haphazardly. At this point I begin to wonder if we even still want the pizza. If it's even worth it. I want to call Adam or Kate, but I don't have my phone on me. It's in the car. I go out to get it. I call Kate, but she doesn't answer. I don't have Adam's number. I realize that I'm completely unable to contact them. This odd, Lynchian thought comes to me: that I've gone and disappeared into this “Pizza Hut void,” where no one can communicate to or from.

I pull into the parking lot of a skating rink. It's night. I'm under the impression that I have a gym class at this time, however it turns out that it'd already happened, so I'd missed it. A bunch of kids try getting into my car. I tell them not to. “Haven't you heard of manners.” There's a pile of chicken bones on the ground by me, to my left. I start gnawing on a chicken wing that still has meat on it. Once I've eaten all the meat, I look at the bone. It says “sold to Susan” on the back, engraved into it. Then Julia is there. She has a bottle of tequila. She tells me that she's going to go drink it alone in the woods. I say, “why don't you just do that at home?” She shoots down my suggestion with a dismissive “ehh.” She keeps taking huge swigs from the bottle and it shocks me how she doesn't grimace at all.

I'm in my room. I look out the window and the moon is MASSIVE in the sky. A full moon. It's wobbling around quickly in a tightly radiused path. I think, “does it always rise that fast?” I consider that there are some facts about the moon I don't know, and I rationalize the movement as one of those. The moon is incredibly bright and, like I said, huge. It has continents on it too. In fact, I think it looks a lot like Earth, but it's a dream, so I believe that it is the moon.

I hear Liam outside my door. I run over to tell him to look at the Moon, but it isn't Liam there, it's his friend. I ask him instead if he'd like to come see the moon, but he seems indifferent. Then Liam comes out and says that he'd like to. I tell them, “one second,” quickly put a pair of pants on, then let them in. They go over to the window and I go to turn off the lights, to make our viewing better. When I get back, the sky is cloudy, and the moon is much less visible. It isn't as striking anymore. A fireball, however, seems to have floated off the side of the moon, which looks cool. Liam points this out to me. I can hear it ‘woosh’ across the sky.

I notice these flying things and wonder if they're government drones. I say half-jokingly to Liam's friend, “look, UFOs,” but as they get closer to us, they begin to appear very much as actual UFOs, unmistakably. I get scared and close my eyes. Suddenly, I'm gripped with a weird physical sensation. It's very scary and there's a deep feeling of fear. I think to myself, “physically, I'm feeling different. Mentally, I'm feeling different, this is it, I'm getting abducted.” After I have that thought, I manage to snap awake.

I'm in a classroom after class. It's me and a trans girl. We're both looking at a piece of paper with something helpful written on it—like notes for class or something. She seems to have done her work on that page to turn in, but I need the page for my notes, so I ask if she could take a picture of it and rewrite her answers to turn in. I ask kindly, but she seems weird. She has weird vibes toward me. Kids from the next class start coming into the classroom. Soon the room is full, but me and the girl are blocking two of the people's seats. The guy whose seat I'm sitting in is standing near me, putting his stuff on the desk. I apologize and tell him it'll be just a second more. He's nice and funny. He and some other people in the classroom start joking with us. I ask which class is next and he says “ethics.”

The teacher walks in and is carrying in his hand a coat with a fur-lined hood. They start class by doing an odd, in unison hand movement thing. Me and the girl finally leave. I turn around and make peace signs outside the window of the classroom and the class does them back enthusiastically. The girl and I walk a ways further together, then separate with me going to a drinking fountain and her to an elevator.

Someone was trying on all my thongs and throwing them out.

Me, Catherine, and Julia went down all these flights of stairs. We travelled all this way downward to a little room WAY beneath the ground. The ultra bottom floor of a building. We went into this tiny, little room and there was an audio player, an iphone, I think. There was a recording on there that—either I wanted Julia to hear the recording or Julia made the recording, I can’t remember. But that was why I dragged them down there.

I'm out in a boat on a lake with Lola. It's tropical. We run into a girl who kinda reminds me of Caroline. She's on a boat too. We follow her over to this island that she lives on. There's a dead cat head on the beach near her house. I find that odd.

Then I'm on a raft navigating down the side of a male-only orphanage with some documents in my hand that indict her for something. Like I'm a whistleblower. The walls are steep and it's a bit scary. I talk to some kid there and tell him that his house is stylistically my favorite in town. Then I run into these two high school girls and we talk. They show me their favorite houses in town. We walk on a cobblestone street past a green colored house with big glass windows and a guy inside. I comment on how I like that house too. I say it's my second favorite in town.

We go to one of the girls' houses. She lives on the first floor of a building in a room right off the street with reddish walls. There's a sliding glass door outside of which you can see the side of another apartment building, perpendicular to hers. That apartment building has a ton of shoes dangling off the side. Like, the shoes are all lined up on pegs hanging off the building. I ask if they store them there for the winter. I'm thinking to myself that they'll get snowed on and damaged, so I find it odd they'd keep them there.

At a bus stop. Dante's telling me he's pretty fucked up on molly or something. I'm trying to find the Minneapolis bus schedule on his phone. A girl nearby compliments “my” phone, but I tell her it's Dante's phone: “I wish it was my phone, it is really nice.” The bus finally comes and we go to a bar, but I can't find my wallet. I can't even find my backpack. I ask Dante and the girl if they have it and they say they threw it in a huge pile of garbage across campus called “The Mouth” or something. I prepare to walk all the way there to get it. It's raining. I look into my backpack to get my phone out to map where it is and I realize—I have my backpack! So I go back to the bar. I pull my wallet out and see that my card and ID aren't where they usually are. I look in the cash area and see they're there, except it isn't them. Upon closer inspection, it's Charlie's ID and credit card. I keep looking in the wallet and I find basically everyone's IDs but my own. The woman next to me at the bar asks if my name is Sandy. I say no, that's my grandma.

I'm at some class or something with Mom. The only students in the class are Mom and me and this other guy—he's maybe late 20s with a buzz cut. We go somewhere after the class and the guy is there too. Julia's with us now. I play music for us and Mom starts dancing. I feel shy about playing music, because the guy is sitting in a folding chair right in front of us, though he does have his back to us. I keep skipping around the music because of this embarrassment. Finally the guy gets up to leave. As he puts on his coat, he turns to us and makes a comment. Something about what we'd been doing. Mom interprets his comment as not a nice comment and starts talking shit about him after he leaves. I try to defend him, but I'm feeling exhausted.

I go over to someone's house under the guise that I am getting piano lessons from them, but it turns out to be the house of the girl who I skipped out on tutoring. The first 40 minutes of the lesson are spent with the mom of the girl. The mom is just sort of dicking around on the computer. I don't know what she is doing. I'm trying to make small talk with her. Finally the girl comes downstairs so I can stop talking to the mom. At this point, it's like 9:40pm and I'm supposed to leave at 10.

The girl needs help on integrals and derivatives I'm told. She's young, so I'm surprised she's learning about this kind of thing. She pulls up a website with all these questions she's supposed to answer. It's not really derivatives and integrals, she's supposed to find patterns in fish or something. Like “given a bunch of fish, find some common thread.” My guess is that it's a “leading in” activity to calculus somehow.

A fish tank appears in the room and we look at the fish. The dad comes over and I make a comment about how weird the fish look. I start riffing, “wouldn't it be so strange if all these fish were native to MN?” etc. Just annoying shit. The dad isn't very jovial or responsive. An alligator-type fish keeps escaping from the tank and lunging at my ankles. It is extremely annoying and I have to keep moving around to avoid it biting me. Finally, my time is up and I can leave.

I go out to the bus stop. I see a bus coming, so I go up to it, but it's not my bus. It's a short bus. Autumn B. also goes up to the bus and realizes it isn't hers. We walk back together to the bus shelter. I see another bus down the street. Everyone at the stop starts walking down to it and surprisingly the driver lets people on, even though it's not a stop. Devin W. and I are among the stragglers who didn't immediately walk down to the bus when we saw it. When we see it letting people on, we start to walk down toward it. We're about halfway between the bus stop and the bus when I comment something like “he'd better let us on.” Immediately after saying this, the bus shuts its doors and speeds down the street. We start running down the street toward the old bus stop, screaming for the driver to stop. He does stop there, but we're too far away. The bus driver can definitely see us running, but speeds off anyway. It's cold out. I melodramatically complain about this to Devin and Henry S., wailing in defeat.

We get back to the bus stop and I take out my phone to check the schedule, but I can't find it. I'm trying to show Devin how to find it, too. We work on this for like 20 minutes. We start going crazy a bit. At one point, Devin lies down on a bench and cracks his back, which makes a very satisfying sound. We are incredibly restless at this point.

Finally a bus comes (right after I make the bus schedule finally work). I get on the bus without my mask on or Ucard out, so I apologize to the driver, who is incredibly nice about it. The bus is packed, even though there aren't that many people on there. I guess it is just small. The seats are this red vinyl. It is like an oval-shaped interior, like the fuselage of an airplane, but so cramped. I get to the back and make a comment about how awful it is to a girl who is sitting on her seat all daintily, like sitting on the edge of her seat. She doesn't respond.

I'm in a zoom call with the wrong precalc 2 class. It's a Tuesday and I'm on my computer at home—it was the wrong time too, had it even been Wednesday. Anyway, Zoey and Caroline are both in the zoom call. It's the woman professor's class. Toward the end of the class, the students start getting rowdy and turning on their cameras and saying shit unprompted, which makes their panel takeover the screen (as it does on zoom). The teacher scrambles to close down everyone's mic and camera access. It's then that I realize I'm in the wrong class, and that, in fact, I don't have any class today, so I leave.

I go to the [neighbor]'s backyard and lie down in a little grassy patch with my computer still by me. I fall asleep there. When I wake up, I follow Lola up the hill through a path in the tall grass into the cul de sac where I see a little character with hands that burn flames. He reminds me of an Adventure Time character. I go back down to the [neighbor]'s backyard to find my backpack. Katarina's mom is up on their back porch building something and I wave to her. Then Katarina comes out the sliding glass doors and says something to her mom.

On a big rock, I see this insane bug, like a huge stag beetle with these pincers at its bottom and hands like claws. And its body is spaced out into 2 areas, so it looks as though it has a “head.” I'm like, “holy shit! Katarina come look at this” but she's hesitant to come down. The bug starts talking to me, telling me she's going to hurt me. She has the energy of a deranged little girl. She tells me she can emit fire from her hands (at this point I've forgotten about the other fire-hand guy, so I don't make any connections). I'm scared of her, so I start to strangle her. (I don't view her as human, I view her as a bug, so this is not fucked up in my mind.) I scream up to Katarina and beg her to come down and help me kill this bug. I don't feel like I have the physical strength to crush her throat with my own two hands.

Eventually my arms get too tired and the bug still hasn't died, so I let go and start talking to her again. I'm stalling, so I'm like, “wait, you said you can emit fire from your hands? That's so cool, can you show me?” (trying to see how far flattery can take me). She shows me the flames from her hands and I'm like “coooool.” Then it clicks for me that the character I met earlier in the dream with the flame hands—he's my ticket out of this mess, because he's the real “plot,” not me dying by the bug-girl. He's her real “battle.” My situation feels much less dire after this realization. (Before this it really seemed like the bug-girl killing me was going to be the full plot of the dream.)

My flattery somehow works with the bug-girl and we hit it off as friends. We walk together as I continue to look for my computer. We look in this shed, still in the [neighbor]'s backyard, but I don't find it there. I bring up some topic while we're in the shed, but she hushes me because there is “a spirit guard” or something around. By now the bug-girl is fully a human and no longer a bug. She is just a chick I'm hanging out with.

We leave the shed and go to my garage to check if I'd actually just left my computer in my backpack. I see the Sienna car door open and for a second I'm like shit, someone broke in, but then I see it's just Mom. I check my backpack in the front seat and the laptops in there. Then I turn and see Dad sitting in a car in the driveway. I ask Mom why he's here and she says it's because he gave her a ride home from work. I decide to just not turn around to look at him. He begins to drive away down the street, really fast, then down by the [other neighbor]'s house he turns around and comes back up. Then he's riding a motorcycle, really fast up in the cul de sac. It's obnoxious and he's doing it on purpose to bother us. I run into the middle of the street to test if he'll stop or if he'll hit me with the motorcycle. When he sees that he's headed right toward me, he jumps off of the bike, but doesn't stop it, so it comes careening down the street toward me. It's wobbling back and forth, moving unpredictably, like bikes do. I manage to stop it with my leg somehow without it absolutely annihilating me.

Dad comes over and I yell at him. I start hitting him with the bike (I could pick it up, I guess). He's being really awful, snide, mocking, thinks he's better than us and that it's all a joke. Just acting like a jackass. The group around us grows bigger with my friends (I don't know where they came from, they just like appeared). It is night now. He's still being horrible and I'm visibly upset. Eventually I just stop responding to his provocation and go quiet. He says something, mocking and sarcastic, like, “hey you good? What's the matter?” At this, Kai comes over and tells him to fuck off.