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.

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 town has frequent visits from phantom apparitions, and the townspeople have many explanations for the ghosts, ranging from disbelief to hallucination to the idea that humans and phantoms were once a single race.

Through a confronting use of second-person, four haunted houses are hypothesized, each worse than the last, and ending with the most terrifying picture of all: dark reality in suburbia.

A New Yorker riding the subway to meet her lover suddenly finds herself exiting onto an unfamiliar platform that furls out into an alternate version of New York, unable to find her way home.

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

A young boy grows up believing that he is a detective in an imaginary city, and he quickly grows suspicious of his new neighbor. As he grows older, he ruminates on his imaginary city.

After kicking her husband out and changing the locks, a mother imagines he is still living with her, distant and uninterested in sex. Lying in bed, she conjures up old memories and imagines new ones, grappling with questions of selfhood, identity, womanhood, and motherhood. One night, her real husband returns, and she lets him back in.

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.

In a dystopic future on Earth, as a woman comes home from vacation, she hears about a continent emerging from the sea as old ones sink, and returns to find her husband released from Rehabilitation Camp. He and his fellow researchers discover how to make a “sun tap” to channel the sun’s energy into power, but then he is again forced away by the government, into a hospital.