What Have You Been Doing Lately

"What I Have Been Doing Lately" is the wandering journey of a mysterious narrator. The story begins with her lying in bed when the doorbell rings. Her state of (un)consciousness is not revealed. (Does she wake up?) The settings of the story shift within an undefined and vague time and space. A story of coming and going, return and departure, the narrator walks and walks, leaving familiar landscapes to enter unfamiliar ones to return …

…a dream, I would identify this is an example of lucid dreaming; the ability to directly control, change, or manipulate a desirable or undesirable aspect of a dream. This ability, however, is a slippery one, manifesting infrequently, not usually a regular occurrence. At the end of the story, the narrator is still trapped in the ringing doorbell cycle, and is miserable. Instead of the unconscious resorting to lucidity, she comforts herself, strokes her own head.