Sonder Murder

 

I woke up normally today. Nothing fancy really, just rolled over, grabbed my phone, and did the daily ritual of checking emails.

And there it was: an email about a job I’d applied for. Surprise, surprise, I got rejected.

I sighed, shrugged it off, and went back to bed. Totally normal. Rejections are practically part of my morning routine now (sad, but true).

But before I could fall asleep again, I just sat up. Something in my brain went click, like I somehow already knew I was going to get rejected from that particular job today.

Here’s the weird part: I’d dreamt about it.

Now, the details were all over the place, but it had enough clues that I instantly knew what it was about. In the dream, I was back in my old college classroom, a place I haven’t been in almost two years. My classmates were there, some faces familiar, others sort of blurred.

My friend walks past me, trying to get to her seat. She looks at me and says, “This was not okay.”
And instantly, in the dream itself, I somehow knew she was talking about an interview that didn’t go well.
“Why? What happened?”, I ask. She doesn’t answer. Just smiles and shakes her head in disappointment. And I knew (again, dream logic), that she was talking about the interview for “Content Writer”, the very job I had applied for. Don’t ask me how, but I knew.

I look down at my notebook (for some reason I had one) and see the words: “sonder murder.” Something else had been scribbled out beneath it, and “murder” was written over it.
My friend laughs and says "It's Midwest, silly." I laugh too, because I realize it was supposed to be “Sonder Midwest,” the name of a digital magazine I’d been looking at earlier that day.

We laugh about it.
But when I woke up, I couldn’t shake it off. Because immediately after, I got that rejection.

Maybe it’s just a random psychological coincidence. But I had applied to multiple jobs that day, so why that one? Why did my brain zero in on that exact rejection before it even happened?
The most likely situation is that my brain didn’t predict anything, it just dressed up my anxieties in dream logic, the way dreams always do.

But because my brain never knows when to stop, it immediately flipped from "wow that's creepy" to "okay but imagine if this was a game."

Hear me out:

Imagine a character who gains the power to predict the future, but only through dreams that never make complete sense. The details are wrong; faces are swapped, locations are off, but the core event is real. And the only way to understand the dream is to catch the clues before the real-life version happens.
Sometimes it’s something small. A conversation, a broken mug. Sometimes, terrifyingly big like a car crash, a murder, a disappearance. And here’s the catch: trying to stop the event might cause it.

For example, imagine dreaming that you’re running late for a class you haven’t attended in years. You’re rushing through hallways that don’t quite belong to any real school, and you keep seeing the number “47” everywhere; door numbers, notebook pages, the time on someone’s watch.
When you wake up, nothing dramatic happens. Until later that day when you take the bus and realise the route number is 47, and that the delayed bus causes you to bump into someone you haven’t seen in years, triggering the very conversation the dream hinted at.

Or imagine this, you dream that you are in your local supermarket but it looks nothing like the real one. The colours are too bright, the shelves too tall, and the layout keeps shifting with the aisles looping in random circles. You are pushing a shopping cart, shopping list in hand. However, the list has no normal grocery items on it. Just random words like “Tuesday”, “Street”, and “Number”.
You notice a woman in a bright yellow jacket. You don’t recognize her but you somehow know she’s someone you’ve spoken to before. Perhaps someone who asked you for directions last week, or someone who held a door for you. She’s looking for something. You ask her what it is. She says, “My way out.” Not scared. Not panicked. Just stating a fact. You try to follow her, but the aisles shift around, and she turns a corner you can’t reach.

That’s when you wake up. Later that day, you see a community alert about a woman, wearing a yellow jacket, reported missing from your neighbourhood. Not the same face, not the right age, even the circumstances aren’t remotely similar but the core eerily lines up.

Mechanic-wise: the MC wakes from each dream, writes it down in a journal, and has to piece together the meaning before the real-life version plays out. The more you intervene, the blurrier the dreams get. How much of the future can you actually change and what’s the cost?

Why Sonder Murder though?

But the part that wouldn’t leave my head wasn’t even the dream. It was the phrase itself. It’s such a strange pairing my brain decided to concoct but somehow, it lingered at the back of my mind.

Sonder – the realization that every person you encounter, for even a few seconds, has a life as vivid, complex and unique as your own (John Koenig; The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, 2012). 
Murder – a violent, finite ending.
That pairing feels like the death of possibility. Like the moment someone’s story just stops.

In my dream, “murder” wasn’t written over “sonder,” but next to it. Almost like an addition, not a correction. The two ideas coexisting, empathy and ending, side by side. It’s unsettling. But also, a little poetic.

Maybe it’s nothing. Probably just one more weird dream in the archive. But I have heard people say dreams know something we don’t. Perhaps this one just decided to let me in early.