You come to on a train. You must have dozed off again on your way to work. You were having a strange dream, but can’t quite remember what it was. Sitting on your left is a man wearing a black bomber jacket and an orange cowboy hat. You take a second to consider what an unusual combination this is, but before you can derive the motive behind his complexing choice of accessory, your stop arrives.

You make your way to the front of the train, past the other passengers who, for the most part, also seem to be on their way to work, dressed in business attire and carrying black bags of various sizes and shapes. You step out onto the subway platform and quickly hustle across the worn yellowy-white tile to the stairs, where you fight past the normal rush hour crowd on your way out. You have to hurry because you took too long making your coffee this morning and only have 15 minutes to get to work in what is usually a 20-minute walk.

Your coffee!

You abandoned it on the train, and now it’s not entirely clear how you’ll be able to make it through work until lunch time, your only chance to get what should be your second cup.

You shake your head at your absentminded mistake as you weave your way through the overwhelming amount of people crowding the city sidewalks. This type of foot traffic always makes you a bit nervous – there should never be this many people in one place.

You shake it off and keep pushing your way through, sometimes using your black leather briefcase as a shield against the incoming human missiles.

At last, you make it to your place of work, a building not unlike most of the others in the city that houses thousands of cubicles and small offices for all of the other people like you. Luckily, you are one of the few with an office, even though you may not have room to fit much other than a trash can and a desk with a small swiveling chair.

You step onto the white and gray marble floor of the lobby, greeting the receptionist as you practically run by (maybe you should enter a speed-walking competition) and hop into the elevator right as it’s about to close. Unlike most days, there is an office friend accompanying you on the ride today, and your usual morning journey is this time not spent in complete, awkward, eye-contact-avoiding silence.

You arrive at your floor, bid your friend farewell and a good luck at their respective desk, and walk over to your office. You open the alarmingly unimpressive mahogany-colored door (it’s not actually mahogany, just blank, cheap wood with a mahogany-patterned plastic glued to it to make it seem as if it might be).

You set your briefcase by on the right-hand side of your desk in the usual fashion, and take a seat in your little swivel chair that the office didn’t even provide for you. But that’s ok, you like your swivel chair and much prefer it over the non-swivel wooden chair the office did offer.

Almost as soon as you sit down you power on your desktop computer and begin typing the beginning of the day’s arduous reports.

In your sleep-deprived state and lacking coffee, the morning passes quickly, as you are basically sleepwalking through your morning activities and paperwork. You go to the breakroom for your hour-long lunch (you don’t like to actually leave the office because you always want to make sure you’re back right on time to start work again). You eat some type of green sandwich wrap that is actually quite good as far as office food goes and chase it with the biggest cup of coffee (one packet of sugar and no cream) that you could find.

And then it’s back to work.

When your work day finally ends, you get on the 7:10 subway back to your block, this time noticing a girl who looks to be about 16 but is attempting to calm an anxious-looking infant.

You finally make it back to your three-bedroom apartment. Regardless of your job’s lack of creativity, it does pay fairly well and was able to get you this great apartment in a relatively upscale neighborhood. You feel lucky that you have it Your lab-and-who-knows-what-else mix runs up to you, excited to greet his owner. You open the fridge and take out a cherry-flavored yogurt, your favorite before-dinner snack, take off the tinfoil lid, and savor the first delicious spoonful. You take your silver iPhone 5 out of your suit pocket and call your favorite Chinese food restaurant on speed dial. You order your usual – shrimp fried rice with a small order of sesame chicken.

You sit down on your worn but originally expensive black leather sofa and watch sitcoms on your flat-screen to kill time as you wait for your food to arrive.

Your food finally gets there after over an hour (the delivery time is advertised to be 30 minutes) and your dog, smelling the food, follows you around, begging, until you throw him a piece of chicken. He knows your habits too well. You sit at your modern-looking varnished white kitchen table and eat dinner alone, but not lonely. When you are finished with dinner, you read a book by Stephen King, your favorite author, until you fall asleep.

You wake up the next morning at six as always. You brush your teeth with the teeth-whitening stuff the always advertise of TV. You eat Rasin Bran for breakfast, which you think is an extremely underrated cereal. You finish eating, pour yourself a mug of coffee, straighten your suit jacket, and pick up your briefcase from where you left it last night – on the right-hand side of the front door. You leave your apartment and walk across the street to the subway station, walk down the worn yellowy-white tile, and arrive just in time to catch the seven o'clock train. You walk to the back of the car and take a seat.

You come to in an uncomfortable bed with scratchy covers. As your eyes flicker open, you look around you at your room. In the dark, everything looks the way it always does – your nightstand next to you, the small window on the far wall that is mostly blocked by a tree, and your chair in the corner of the room diagonally across from your bed, where you sometimes like to read or finish work.

But then someone turns on a glaring fluorescent light. As you adjust, you realize that you are not in your room, but some other room. The furniture is placed right, yes, and your bed is just as uncomfortable, but the walls are a sickening mint green color instead of relaxing beige. And your chair in the corner is no longer your plush brown leather armchair, but one of those metal and plastic chairs they sometimes have at high schools.

A woman in scrubs approaches you, asking you how you feel this morning and announcing, but in a gentle voice, that it’s time for your daily medicine and tests, “sweetheart”. It is then that you realize that you’re in a hospital. But how did you get there?

You think that you must be dreaming, although you feel very awake. Your head hurts. You reach up to hold it but the nurse stops you before you can.

“I wouldn’t do that, sweetheart,” she says in a voice with a slight southern accent that’s smooth as molasses. She is a middle-aged, larger-bodied woman with an obvious fake tan and bleach blonde hair with a terrible perm.

She seems to mean well, so you put your arm back down.

“Why am I here?” you ask her. “What’s going on?”

“Oh, sweetheart, it’s ok,” she drawls, “you just were in a little accident on the train. We can talk all about that later once you’re feeling better.”

You’re extremely confused, but thinking this much makes your head hurt even more, so you put your trust in this stranger. She must know best.

She inserts an IV into the corner of your elbow, and a clear fluid makes its way down from the hanging bag through the tube to your arm. Your vision blurs as the nurse croons, “Don’t fight it sweetheart, it’ll all be ok.”

You come to on a train. You must have dozed off again on your way to work. You were having a strange dream, but can’t quite remember what it was. Sitting on your left is a man wearing a black bomber jacket and an orange cowboy hat. You take a second to consider what an unusual combination this is, but before you can derive the motive behind his complexing choice of accessory, your stop arrives.