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.

When a young boy witnesses an odd event from the window of his small-town house, he begins to doubt the stability of the world around him.

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.

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.

When an old woman sees her son straining to leave to see the world, she remembers her husband doing the same many years earlier. In a fierce battle pitting love against discovery and adventure, she does her utmost to set him free.

A young man has been experiencing intense hallucinations for most of his life. When one of his nightmares begins to seem a little too real, he realizes there may be an explanation for these experiences, and it may have something to do with his mother's death.

A creative writing teacher sits through a conference with one his favorite students. He takes us on a journey through the characters in the story, and in his life.

A young woman recounts three times in her life when she felt emotions of an unexplainable transcendent love: watching a ballet for the first time, making eye contact with an attractive librarian in high school, and listening to an old professor lecture during night classes at a university.

A Polish immigrant feels her mind slipping away, as her surroundings and even her own body seem unfamiliar. After she's diagnosed with Alzheimers, she reflects on the importance of her memories and her past.

On the night before her wedding, a woman dreams of the house that she once lived in with her family, but then wakes up and must come to terms with how her life has changed since then.