(Somewhere in Wisconsin) The conversation started the same way as it always does. I was sitting across from Michael at a lunch table in the cafeteria. All I wanted to do was eat me luke warm chicken over half-cooked rice and return to my desk with enough time to watch a Family Guy before getting back on my computer to continue coding. Just as I was almost finished with my meal, Michael begins, as he always does, by saying “So I had this dream the other night..”

Oh God. No Stewie today I guess.

“So, it starts off, and I’m standing in this cave with every person I have ever met. I walk through the crowd and it’s like I am reliving my entire life. While my physical body was not changing, my soul felt as if it were aging just as it had over the course of my lifetime.” I realized that this was going to be a bad one because I had just finished my rice and chicken and he hadn’t even gotten to the first scene change. I need to make sure I don’t drink all of my water before he finishes the story, otherwise I’ll be completely parched.

“Just as I was about to reach out to my father, who I hadn’t seen since he passed away three years ago, I fell through the floor and found myself at my childhood church. I walked inside and everything felt the same at first, but as I walked toward the inner sanctuary I began to realize that everything was just a little bit off. Almost as if I was on a set, not really at the church I used to remember.” Damnit. I finished my water and I know he hasn’t even gotten anywhere with this story. I just want to yell at him, “Michael! Your dreams are only interesting to you!”

“The door to the inner sanctuary didn’t open at first. After a couple of jostles and a solid hit with the shoulder, the door fell open and light spread across the dark room within. There were three ghouls within the church, each of them feasting on a stack of pamphlets from the weekend before. However, the pamphlets were unlike anything I had ever seen. They were thick and black and they melted like a candy bar under the teeth of the ghouls.” Oh my god dude, wrap this story up. I have to have enough time to get my afternoon coffee and pee before the boss wants us back at work.

“The ghouls turn to me and I realize that I am completely defenseless. As one of them launches at me, the scene changes again.” Okay. Final scene change. We are on the home stretch now. You can do this.

“I look around and I realize that I have entered the Tesseract. All around me plays the moments of my life where I had to make a fundamental choice that would alter my life forever. I could see the moment I chose to chase after that man running across the baseball field. A man who would later be my husband. I see when we fell asleep in that Ikea and decided to adopt our daughter Cora. I saw a life well lived.” I’m not going to lie, I have completely lost what he is talking about, but it sounds like he is about to try to draw some weird meaning out of his dream and finally wrap this up.

“Right as I was about to input the co-ordinates onto the second hand of the watch, the scene changed again and I was in a sea of tongues.” Oh you have got to be kidding me. Another scene change? Who does he think he is?

4 SCENE CHANGES ISN’T ONE DREAM MICHAEL. YOU PROBABLY JUST HAVE SLEEP APNEA.

“I sank into the tongues. I sank through them, into them. I became them. That’s when I woke up. Weird, huh?” With that, Michael got up, cleared off his plate, and walked back to his desk. What a waste of time.