In class today, we were given a conversation starter to break the ice with our new table group. "Introduce yourself," she said. "Tell them your name your conservatory, and your favorite smell."

It's when I open the window sometime late at night. The air comes in, and it's fresh, beautiful, humble.

• A cup of lukewarm water on my desk.
• I stay beside the window. Petrichor, and that refreshing, stinging feeling as I breathe in the chilled air.
• I come back. My laptop is on my desk. The screen has already faded to black when you come back from the window. (I remember I set it to turn off after five minutes of inactivity, so I know I've been at the window for at least five minutes. It's an insignificant detail, but small numerical, logical items like these have always helped ground me. Something familiar. Unchanging.
• On my desk, besides my laptop, a few textbooks, and stationary I got last summer in Korea, is also a small notebook open to a page covered in scribbles and drawings. ("Break the book in...write in it," writes Dr. Anne Carroll. How true, I thought, when I read that. It's so difficult to focus on writing when presented with a blank slate and made to perform tasks on it. When an artist shows me their sketchbook, it always delights me to see those pages where there's a post-it note on the page, and it's been drawn over, sketched over, intergrated into the drawing, yet still undeniably there, a square pop of color. It's the quirks like these that give life to a person.)

Identity. When you wake up, your first conscious question is not, who, what am I? Your subconscious already knows. Stop ten people on the street and ask for their identity. One might panic, grasp their coat tighter, mumble, and leave, faster than the wind. Most would look at you funny, maybe turn up their nose, and go about their day. Some have a story, a whole essay formulated after years of pride and loss. You might meet an eight-year-old with one of these essays. A refugee, perhaps, already chin-deep in bitter goodbyes and overused maybes.

Inception (2010) was five dream-layers deep, each layer paced differently, and with careful purpose, he said. I was fourteen when I nearly had a crisis watching it. I always come out of a theater disoriented and feverish, applying everything from that world to mine, wondering if mine is really mine. I toss it in my ever-growing collection of worries and doubts. Like you, I am an overthinker.

English is stifling; so many words are required to chase an emotion before it is finally captured, and, even then, not quite. The French have the phrase, deja reve, already dreamed. Deja reve hits you harder than deja vu, already seen. We experience so many things; getting tangled up is inevitable. But we strictly differentiate dreams from living reality, so, if we have dreamt something exactly like this before, something is wrong. Cobb asks, are you in limbo? How many years has it been? For how many years did he and his wife rebuild their lives from ashes, never asking a single question? He slides the gun across the table and asks Saito to take a leap of faith. The bullet takes the leap and soars through his head, made of substance-less dreams, and continues, tearing through the last layer, returning us to reality. Audience members were swept up in a never-ending debate about the ending. Did the top ever fall? Nolan leaves us hanging. Perhaps he himself did not know the answer.