You wake up to find the traffic lights have all been replaced by severed heads. Their empty eye sockets glow red and green. We try to ignore them on our way to work, sipping coffee from cardboard cups while long black hair delicately strokes the top of our SUV as we pass beneath them.

You wake up and find yourself covered in bright yellow feathers. Frightened, you peer out the window. Your neighbors are on the street. Confused. They also changed. Some, covered in blue and purple fur. One, living in a trash can. Each of you transformed bodily to represent your sinful desires.

You wake up and stand in front of the bathroom mirror for a long time. "Who am I?" you ask. Something is moving inside of your pajamas. Cautiously you pull them open. You find two children sitting on each other's shoulders pretending to be you. They gasp and run away, and you cease to exist.

You speak into the darkness of the cave, but the sound that comes back to you is not an echo. The Earth is learning your voice. It's repeating your words, almost perfectly, but not quite. "Why are you doing this?" you ask. Something in the distance moves softly, "Why are you doing this?" it asks.

Your headstone is carved with your last words. "Don't dig deeper." But they did anyway. And they found a headstone that continued deep into the ground, like the blade of a long sword, carved with every word you ever said in life. Every word of love and hate. Every sound, starting with "Ma-ma..."

Your headstone is carved with your last words. "Don't dig deeper." But they did anyway. And they found a headstone that continued deep into the ground, like the blade of a long sword, carved with every word you ever said in life. Every word of love and hate. Every sound, starting with "Ma-ma..."

A boy points. White smoke rises from the craft shack chimney. The council has already elected a new camp leader. There is cheering from the sunburned crowd. Their hands and faces are sticky with too many looted marshmallows. Wendy's body still hangs from the tether ball pole near the lake.

You swallow the dark green pill. It hisses down your throat in a perfectly straight line. You feel it burn through your chest and down your leg. A wad of hot lead drops out of your foot onto the grass and something like black mud begins to pour out of the hole. Immediately you start to feel better.

The ocean has no desire to eat and consume, but it is overwhelmed by a need to taste. It lashes at our shores with its wet tongue and sucks on our legs like popsicles. It desperately reaches, sick of salt, licking, like a feral cat with its tongue through a fence, trying to taste our sugary skin.

You pull the wad of tissue away from your bleeding nose and notice words in the red stains. You lay it flat against the bench, leaning over it, dripping. The story is about you, in the future. It is telling how you will die. But it is unfinished. You violently twist your nose and keep writing.

Every night you wake up and find yourself slowly drifting upward from your bed towards the ceiling. You roll over and pull yourself down to your mattress. Your arms and legs cling to it, as if grabbing hold of the underside of a falling elevator. Every morning you wake up with no memory of this.

Every day you wake up and check the Bullet App. The App shows you the location of the bullet that will one day kill you. Yesterday, it entered the city you live in. Today, it is in your neighbor's yard. You look out your window and see Dave, mowing his lawn. He waves. You wave back and smile.

You realize you do not have enough money. The grocer is waiting. The line is impatient. You pull the last coin from your pocket. The coin you found under the tree as a child. The coin with your mother's face. The coin you press into your palm when you are very scared. You place it on the counter.

Your dentist returns with the X-rays. "I'm afraid we found something." He says. You see what appears to be a large marble staircase at the back of your throat. A strange fog swirls on the steps as they ascend into your mind. Very faint and very far away, five robed figures whisper in the darkness.

There are too many people in the McDonald's Playland. They are pressed against the plastic windows, crushed together in the ball pit, tangled in the black climbing net. They are clogging the slide hole. There is an awful sound. You are trying to eat your lunch, but so is the McDonald's Playland.

You find a book open on the table with two small daisies growing out of the pages. You sit for a moment before leaning down to place one on each of your eyes. You feel the petals gently unfold under your eyelids. You are now in a field of daisies. You remember what it was like to be a young flower.

I was feeling anxious a few nights ago, so I recorded a little live synth jam to build up my tensions and then set them free. I'll leave it here like a bit of graffiti that says, "RUN UNTIL YOU CAN BREATH AGAIN". youtu.be/U6UeupxIg5o?...

While seeking to fully understand the universe, we dug deep into the Earth. At the center, we found a library filled with billions of books, one book for every soul who had ever lived or would live, each recording a different person's thoughts and dreams. In silent agreement, we burned them.

Every day you wake up to find your dream journal open to a new page. You read the unfamiliar words in the dim light. It talks about normal beautiful moments in life. Quiet walks on beside the lake. Meetings with friends. Sunlight. Clean water. You affix a bayonet to your umbrella and head to work.

Every time you stop scrolling, the next image, the one just off screen, is an image showing how you will die. Every day, you stop just short of seeing it. Just one post away. But some night, when you are feeling anxious and finding it hard to sleep, you will scroll down too far and you will see it.

You reach for an apple in the basket. But at your touch, it starts to glow red. The apples around it begin to melt at the point of contact. It sizzles and sinks into a smoldering hole, burning through the floor and into the ground. You reach for a pear, and the pile dissipates into smoke.

Those who escaped cried in horror as the great machine broke down and was consumed by flames. But then we noticed a rhythm to the sound of the collapsing timbers. The metal gears shrieked like violins, and the screaming voices inside suddenly harmonized. And we wept now at the beauty of the song.

"What do you think of this one?" I say, showing the AI my most recent short story. "Oh, that is very good. I like it." it says. "It's about you," I tell it. "It's about how you only ever say my stories are wonderful and never challenge me to become better." "Yes," says the AI. "It is wonderful."

Every morning you swallow a coin from your bedside table. This activates a claw inside your abdomen that you maneuver over a bin full of good feelings. You reach for hope. It dangles from the end for a moment and then falls back in. "Maybe tomorrow," you say. But you don't believe it.

Halfway through your angry rebuttal to the online post, the words shimmer and turn grey. They lift, like smoke, drifting toward the ceiling. You watch as they evaporate and are gone. You look back at the screen. It is no longer there. You see beyond it. A green hill. Sunlight resting in the trees.

You wake up on a flat empty plane. The smooth grey surface is neither cold nor warm, and it extends infinitely in all directions. You look up. There is no light source, yet the sky gently glows a misty white. You look down. Your body is not visible. "Time for work," you say. And start walking.

You are standing in a field on a warm spring morning when you see the hand of God descend towards you through the clouds. It gently lifts you into the sky between its thumb and forefinger. "Welcome to Heaven" says a calm voice placing you in an identical field on an identical spring morning.

You bump your head hard on a tree branch in the forest. A green lump grows on your forehead. Suddenly, your mind is flooded with strange memories. You remember falling from your mother's arms, Being buried in cold mud, Drinking rain water, forming roots, reaching for the sun every spring.

We discovered that our neighbors across our border had strong bones. We dug in their graveyards at night to find long white femurs and heavy sternums which we crafted into weapons. We used our pale spears and axes to invade during the day to feed our nightly weapons industry.

A hot air balloon is passing over your house. You shield your eyes and can just make out that someone is leaning over the side of the basket. They are waving at you, frantic, yelling. Their voice is familiar. You realize it is you, just as they lean too far and fall, tumbling towards your garden.

The greatest super power is the ability to feel the weight of something before it happens. To see an opportunity and instantly know how it will gather up on your shoulders and to sense its pressure inside your body. Perhaps Superman was able to lift a bus because he knew which bus to say "No" to.

You needed to finish the time machine so you could go back and find yourself. You needed to tell them that the world has purpose. Life has meaning. It will all be okay. But what you were really hoping for was an older version of yourself who would come from the future and tell you the same thing.

She wakes every morning holding a knife. She doesn't know where it comes from. Without disturbing her husband, she buries it in the garden under the lilac while the dog watches from the porch. She finds the hole rough and fresh. Later, her husband kicks the dog for tracking mud through the house.

You are walking in the city when everything begins shifting. The walls of the buildings come apart, revealing human-like figures perfectly camouflaged in concrete and paint. They rise up from sidewalk and trees and cars. Everything was interlocking people who now stand facing you, quietly, waiting.

The universe is expanding. The space between atoms is growing all the time Someday, you will travel back in time and find everything was smaller. Your mother's head was only up to your chest. Jesus was 18 inches tall. If you go back far enough, you could swallow the cosmos like a lemon drop.

You wake up and find your arms and legs are still dreaming. You still feel the hot evening breeze on your naked arms and the strong moving water up to your waist at the edge of the river. You feel the cold wet skin of the motionless child held in your arms and your feet sinking into the dark mud.

If you pick up a sheep and toss it into tree, it will shatter into a hundred smaller sheep which will scatter, frightened in every direction, Your Honor.

The light from our phones never leaves our bodies. It gets trapped inside us. It inflates our organs like balloons and it sizzles like hot oil in our skulls. We wake up anxious because of the trapped light and pour more in to try and heal it. We all eventually die in explosions on the local news.

The light from our phones never leaves our bodies. It gets trapped inside us. It inflates our organs like balloons and it sizzles like hot oil in our skulls. We wake up anxious because of the trapped light and pour more in to try and heal it. We all eventually die in explosions on the local news.

In the frozen vegetable section of Walmart, you find a row of bags with your driver's license photo on them. The bags read, "This Person" and on the bottom they say, "Fun to eat!" A woman comes up behind you and takes one. "Oh, I love these," she says. And you suddenly feel very important.

Something is moving in the potato salad. A dark shape is passing like a snake just beneath the yellow surface inside the tub. "Maybe we should buy a different one," your friend says. "This one is half price," you tell them, placing it on the counter. "And it doesn't expire until tomorrow."

You wake up to the sound of a distant violin. The sound is sad and far away, but it follows you through the house and then to the street. People stare as you pass, cars stop so the drivers can get out and watch you walk by, everyone is stunned by the sound of the lonely violin playing inside you.

You are at the hospital's check-in desk, asking to renew the brain you borrowed last week. But the young woman tells you there is a wait list now. "You are welcome to go across the street and buy one for yourself," she says. You don't remember why, but you know you can't afford to do that.

I recorded a one-take early Saturday morning Synth Jam to spark my day. I liked it enough to put it over footage of a sunrise in Prague so I could share it here. www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RGl...

Alice never found a way to leave Wonderland. And she eventually gave up trying. She moved in with the March Hare in a cave by the water. She shaved her legs with a stone and drank sugared seawater. Much later, she started a library of lost books that washed up on shore. But she never read them.

You are not paying attention to the news on the television. The president is saying something about creating ten million new jobs. You glance up and notice he is holding up an old-timey wanted poster with your face on it. You hear several cars skid to a halt outside your house.

The blood is up to your waist today. You move through it slowly, arms above your head, to the mailbox at the end of your driveway. Inside you find the usual: coupon books, bills for things you tried to cancel, a notice saying the blood level will not change tomorrow but it will now contain bones.

Everyone is wearing a backpack today. Everyone sitting in the park, and walking their dog is wearing large backpacks for reasons you do not understand. Then, at exactly noon, they all pull a cord and a parachute deploys, and they float upside down into the sky. You suddenly feel yourself falling.

You have a stack of shoeboxes next to your bed. And often you peak into them through small eye holes and inside you see your friends, very small, laughing together, or just sitting quietly in empty rooms. A new box arrives and inside the box is your mother. With a sigh, you put it with the others.

You wake up with soft blue feathers in your mouth. You open your mouth in front of the bathroom mirror and find a nest of small baby birds. There is a noise at your window. Their mother is there with her beak full of worms. Obediently you open the window and let her flutter onto your chin.