When an alcoholic-turned-family man in modern-day Cleveland has sleeping problems due to his son’s night screaming, he is haunted by his other family that he left behind a decade prior. During a nightmare about his old family, he wakes up to an even more grim reality.

A man in his thirties recounts two separate memories: being stranded in the middle of a blocked highway, and waiting for his partner inside an abortion clinic. Years after these events have occurred, he contemplates the similarities between them.

During their discussion of philosophy and the downward spiral of the world’s condition, a group of men is startled by a voice in the dark that recounts for them two stories of the human embodiment of battlefield carnage. When the voice finishes, the men struggle to pinpoint where it came from.

Under the cover of secretarial work in a psychiatric unit, the protagonist records patients’ dreams in a logbook dedicated to Johnny Panic, believing themself a disciple to the omniscient master of fear and creator of all dreams. When the protagonist spends the night at the unit for unfettered access to patient records, the clinic director takes them away to a secure room for electroshock therapy.

Having been hospitalized for a long time, a young girl finds herself surrounded by people who cannot understand the strangeness of her illness. After her friend visits her, she must accept that her relationships may never be the same, and that her expectations that tether her to a life outside of the hospital may be very different from the disappointing reality.

An institutionalized man struggling to overcome his paralyzing paranoia hates his weekly "days out" in the city. But during a particularly turbulent two weeks, the realization of his worst fears in the outside world possibly bring about an improvement in his condition.

Debilitating, apparently incurable migraines confine a graduate student to the hospital. When one of her roommates, a strange woman with multiple personality disorder, takes an interest in her, the student's world begins to collapse.

A five-year-old girl and her mother go into hiding with some less-than-savory friends at an upstate New York cabin. While there, the girl sees the ghosts of a past tragedy and, for the first time, confronts the insecurity and inexplicability of her own life.

After a terrible accident, a boy and his family spend the next years in a depression that verges masochism.

After accidentally killing a friend's baby, a 35 year old woman tries to find her footing again at her husband's academic conference in Europe—but finds herself struggling with herself and her marriage.