As a woman slips in and out of sleep, her dreams become windows to moments in her life.

A woman who is not content with life and fears staying in one place works as a traveling writer, recording her thoughts and interactions on tape recorders and finding different lovers in each place she visits.

An aging electrical engineer's intensifying sensation of detachment culminates in a series of debilitating headaches. As he works through fatigue, setbacks, and pain, he finally confronts the source of his desolation.

A 17-year-old girl grapples with a mental abnormality that causes her to associate imaginative scenes with individual words. She undergoes treatment in a sterile clinic to quell her brain's urges.

A man reflects on his complicated summers with his father.

After being recruited for a so-called neurological study, man meditates on the imaginary city he sees in his dreams.

A man's lonely life focused on the pursuit of reason and music leaves him questioning what more there may be in the lives of other people and of religion.

A writing critic reviews the construction of Charles Chesnutt’s stories and how to write surfiction.

A research psychologist visits a peculiar asylum patient who recounts his life story. The patient warns the researcher about how obsession with the pursuit of knowledge can make one lose sight of their humanity until it is unsalvageable.

In a series of commentaries on the human condition — life, truth, happiness, death — a spinster sister takes in her dead sister’s children; a man is entranced by the endless waves which roll and crash in the ocean; a carpenter wrestles with the burden of being everyone’s confidante; a dying railroad crossing watchman shares a simple but complex wisdom.