(clearly I just wanted to make an attempt instead of feeling like I’ll never make it good enough)
Main character wakes up to her alarm clock going off.
“Shit,” she mutters. “That was a great dream, and now I’m already forgetting it”.
This is a usual occurrence for HER. More and more, she finds that her drams are usually fantastic. MUCH better than her real life. What does she do? She goes to work to do a job she hates with people that she does like. She then goes home afterwards and sits in front of the TV eating a frozen meal that she threw in the microwave while drinking a beer. She’s slowly going downhill because she is so miserable.
Driving into work, she gets stuck in terrible traffic and then ends up being late to a very important meeting. After the meeting, her boss tells her she needs to get her act together or he’ll have to fire her.
She goes out to a bar after work and drinks her sorrow away sitting at the bar. A guy sitting next to her hears her complaining to the bartender about how much her life sucks and how badly she wishes she could replay her dreams since they are amazing. She’d much rather live watching those over and over again than living the life she had at the moment. Once the bartender walks away, the stranger turns to her and says, “what if I were to tell you that I have a dream recorder? Not only can you record all of your dreams, but you can put on the headset and immerse yourself back into that dream once more”. She thinks he’s pulling her leg and calls him crazy before throwing down money to pay for her beer and leaving.
As the week goes on, things just seem to be getting worse and worse for her – her car breaks down, her cat dies, her best friend tells her that she’s moving away with her boyfriend, etc. On, and on, and on… At the end of the week, she finds herself back in that same bar, at the exact same stool. Soon enough, the stranger sits back down next to her. She figures, what the heck? If he’s crazy, then I don’t lose anything. If he’s not, then maybe I can improve my life drastically with this so-call “dream recorder”. She asks him whether he is serious, and how much he wants for it.
“No charge”, he replies, “I honestly have been wanting to get rid of it, so if you want it, you can take it with my thanks”.
She finds that odd, but doesn’t question what she believes to be her lucky day. She agrees to meet him back there same time the following night to get it from him.
The next night, she gets there and he’s already there. He has a box roughly the size of a normal briefcase. Inside, there is a device that looks similar to a Blu-ray player and a headset of some kind. He explains how to use it – essentially you wear the headset to sleep. It is blutooth, so you don’t have to connect it to anything. It just talks to the recorder automatically and records each of your dreams. It has a lot of memory, and the dreams don’t take up very much space, so you never have to delete them.
That night, she goes home and tries it out. She had a lovely dream about being on the lake with a handsome gentleman. They laugh, joke, have fun, and then make love on the banks of the river. It’s beautiful to her, and when the alarm clock wakes her up, she immediately gets annoyed only to recall the recording was hopefully made. She has to go to work, but she decides that she’ll try it out when she gets home. Once she wolfs down some food, she pull out the headset and does a search on the recorder (need to figure out an interface here) to the dream from last night. She hit “Replay” and puts on the headset.
Next thing she knows, she is completely immersed in the dream world – it doesn’t feel like she has a headset on and she’s watching a recording. She can feel the breeze on her skin, the sun beating down on her, and hear the birds so clearly. Before she realizes it, she is actually walking around the dream as if she’s there, and it’s less of a recording, but more of a real-world experience. The guy is still there and they have the most lovely time, but she can have different conversations and do different things. She loves it, and when it gets to the end of the dream, she very reluctantly pulls off the headset because she doesn’t think she can keep going after she had woken up.
After removing the headset, she realizes that it’s time to go to bed, so she does; she is hoping that she has another lovely dream so she can live it tomorrow.
Over and over, she keeps repeating this cycle. She dreams, she goes to work, she eats, and then she relives the dreams she had before. She isn’t living her life other than in these dream worlds.
One day, she realizes that she can stay in the dream worlds long after the dreams end, and before she knows what she’s doing, she stays in them for days and days. Finally, a coworker comes by to see what’s wrong, and he finds her with this headset glued to her. She has been defecating on herself and slowly depraving her body and mind of the necessary water and food that it so desperately needs. He pulls the headset off of her and she freaks out because she wants to go back in.
He calls an ambulance and they get her to the ER. She raves for a long time. She has to go through a variety of therapies, etc. to regain a semblance of sanity. Finally, after a couple of years of this, she starts to feel more and more like herself before life and work took the joy out of her.
Happy ending? Twist ending where she suddenly wakes up one day only to realize that the device is on her head so she doesn’t know whether the entire thing was a dream or whether something else nefarious is going on with the recording device… dun dun dun!!