Lin Zhixian, 26, works as a data analyst at an advertising agency. She made it out of a small county town and has spent eight years making a living in a big city. Her life goal has shifted from "getting ahead" to "hanging on until retirement."
She sleeps wonderfully. The moment her head hits the pillow, she's out until morning, and she almost never has trouble sleeping.
But every day, she has all kinds of bizarre dreams.
In her dreams, she randomly enters different parallel worlds and has different stories with different people: a classmate she had a crush on in elementary school, a big shot in a cultivation world, a bookstore owner, a criminal police officer, an observatory researcher, a classmate she doesn't know, a medical student she met on the subway... One after another, the dreams play out in all kinds of genres, from pure romance to suspense to disaster movies.
At her desk, she secretly made an Excel spreadsheet to record the dreams she had each night and information about the male leads. When a coworker caught a glimpse and asked what she was doing, she replied with a straight face, "Competitor analysis."
Her mother urged her to get married and introduced her to someone: a village police officer in a remote village named Gu Yan. He had chosen to leave the county seat and take a job in the most remote village. Her mother said he was an honest man, and it turned out she was right. The two added each other on WeChat and chatted on and off.
"I helped Uncle Tuerxun find his sheep today. He was so happy he gave me a bag of walnuts."
"I mediated a dispute over a homestead today. The two families were arguing over a wall from ten years ago."
Her replies were usually, "That must've been hard," "Were the walnuts good?" and "Why are they only arguing about something that happened ten years ago now?"
In the end, Lin Zhixian realized that she and Gu Yan had simply been standing in two different places, only to happen upon each other by chance. The Earth really is round.
