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 the depths of his mind, a writer tries to uncover the autonomous, nefarious motivations of his own characters.

A man working at a communications community wants a new job. His coworker promises him one, so long as the man helps to hide human body parts.

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.

A writer arrives at an eerie residency near a lake where she camped with her Girl Scout troop as a child. The writer revisits a past trauma at the hands of the other Girl Scouts and comes to conclusions about what it is to reside in one's own mind. Along the way, she navigates a mysterious illness, a fellow resident whose identity and words are impossible to remember, and the appearance of a severed rabbit on her doorstep.

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 recalls his intimate friendship with his former English professor, who resolved to fuel his unsatisfied desire for playwriting during the time they were apart. In their reunion decades later, instead of the brilliant play he promised, the professor shows his former student a disturbing product of his mental instability.

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.

In a futuristic world where the outdoors is clouded in an impenetrable darkness, a group of school children learn about mathematically engineered images that kill those who look upon them. They discover the strange darkness is due to biochips in their brains, designed to protect them from terrorist displays of these images.

On the brink of death, an elderly man recounts his life to his great grandson, revealing that his mother's schizophrenic delusions of an otherworldly fantasy land were no delusions at all.