Dreaming about being at work and talking about how much you hate your job is the worst. This happens when lock-jawed into a sleep paralysis and your sig-nif is awake watching you in some gender excretion role-reversal. Your asleep body feeling like the glass ceiling shards jutting into your neckline, your partner trying to shake you awake. Bleeding out seems like a normal way to die at 2 PM during the workweek. In the lobby, the daycare children dance in your blood, a corporate ploy to tweak young-mind imaginings of Nickelodeon fun-rides as a family event. Only it’s just some nine-to-fiver dreaming of dying because they forgot to read the warning label on the tea they drank before bed. Being a voyeur of your own death is, “Like, exactly why I go to my psychic because Mercury is in retrograde, everyone is experiencing ‘weird things’ ‘right now,’ and people plan their day at the flick of an ever-revolving wi-fi.” A schedule polluting the Earth’s skyline emerging a peak of sun to solar-charge a roof of panels just enough. And when you wake up, you ain’t gotta pay 2,050¢ per gallon. You know that gas-pump “technician” lives above the mart, pays little-to-no rent, works at seasonal festivals, triples the price of HOT TOYs during X-mas on Craigslist, sleeps on the beach (drunk) in the summer, and is constantly vibing on The Trying’s newest tape [sticking out his shirt pocket], LossLess vol. 1: Electrophetamine.

You know they’re always watching, right? Even in your dreams — this dream; your dream; the dream — they’re trying to make commercials into fiber-optic nerves channeling euphoric tie-lines with products you might buy based on subconscious storytelling. YOU CANNOT SKIP THIS AD. Reality television even began warping synapses like a montage of people talking to a camera, but it’s they themselves addressing their television screens [POWER OFF] in a fit that their words aren’t being translated to text on Facebook. It looks like The Office but much more realistic and overcast and dramatic in an intentionally depressed state of anxiety, yet controlled like randomized song titles. Alluding to the mentality of one, yet the other is super unconcerned, so that’s life? And then some musician you’ve hear a thousand times in the office, walking down the street, in your car, at the store, on the john, etc. and etc., tackles your sleepnosis. Their voice and songs get stuck on repeat in your ears all night. Fading out is only an option that gets you funneling a genre-mesh, and you can’t put on headphones in this dream. But music is playing. Someone in the apartment next door is playing a YouTube video playlist of Mindless Self Indulgence. Your dream clicks in and out of scenes from Halloween 4 that remind you of an NIИ show you once went to, and the blend initiates thoughts of discernible reality. Commercials popping up like a .gif on their big screens projecting murders that look like tomato paste ads from your hometown. The Trying’s LossLess vol. 1: Electrophetamine careens a musical rainbow of aura, as it’s put on random for your morning alarm clock, tracks seeping into your head upon first seeing it’s 5:30 AM.

So you wake up at your desk and realize you’ve been talking in your sleep, but oddly answering every question coworkers throw at you. Audio manipulation software has adorned your monitor for the past week. Nobody has asked why they haven’t heard you typing or talking on the phone in awhile. The weight of getting up seems to fade the lights. Under you eyelids, flannels hooked around the necks of shaved heads in a fog that is dense with Nautica and Freshjive cologne overused in the bathroom with JNCO jean patches piecemealed, someone wearing an upside-down, trick-or-treat purple pumpkin as a hat. There’s witchcraft in the kitchen by the office bathroom; Bathroom Code: 214. A mixing bowl in the center of the break room contains a combination of a rusty hammer, hot sauce, Everclear, coffee grounds, bananas, tomato juice, and Corona. Having a sip seems appropriate, but there’s a raw egg floating in yours, and it’s tradition for you to drink it all. Even if you haven’t eaten eggs in the past decade. So you wake up at your desk and realize you drank that raw egg last night and people are yelling in your department about the toxicity emitting from the construction of that test laboratory being developed downstairs, but really it’s coming from your body. Sweat still tastes like scotch. That test laboratory making a pharmaceutical commercial is relying on you to make the commercials they paid you to do, so gripping the LossLess vol. 1: Electrophetamine off the Illuminated Paths website is your best bet for a soundtrack. And you start to question the laboratory’s marketing demographic and warning label. So you wake up at your desk.

They take you away from your desk at 4:59 PM, following the employee guidelines (to paraphrase):

LossLess vol. 1: Electrophetamine by The Trying is entirely conducted around images on a template through computer mechanics that balance a humor/serious measure of musical skill composed with algorithms nobody can manifest physically, so sound can create an overreaction of directional fluidity, where punching the air is dancing and foaming at the mouth while crying is communication.

You wake up in an ambulance, and all the cords are coming out of your body in an array of colored tubes, but nobody notices you gaining consciousness or making noise. It’s been snowing since the skyline broke a sliver of its pollution density, so a gust whips a Smart Car into a typhoon-hydroplane, taring its chassis into and through the back of the ambulance. Two of the frantic EMS workers trying to save your life are ripped out of the shredded metal back door. The third hanging onto your hospital bed. Both of you making eye contact as the vehicle is spun three times across two lanes of oncoming traffic, stopping by wrapping the back and front doors around a tree by the Gold Star Chili on Dalton Avenue during rush hour. So you wake up in your snow-covered hospitable bed with adrenaline pumping blood from wounds and tubes, flexing muscle and spurting streams of red upon the white snow, dragging the driver and EMS worker away from the leaking gas. The ambulance catches fire and continues to burn until the police and fire trucks arrive in a prism of lights that blur the closer they arrive. As the other ambulance immediately puts you into their health-bay — raw and bloodied and barely — The Trying is playing faintly from the front seat. You’re watching out the back while they’re driving away, obscured by flecks of snow, while the crashed ambulance’s oxygen licks fire and plumes in an orange cloud, followed by a geyser of blue and sleep.