July 2008. Lerina Garcia, a well-educated 41-year-old woman, woke up as she did daily at 8 A.M in what seemed to be like a normal morning. However, as she went on with her normal routine, she claims she found small details that seemed peculiar.
Her bed sheets and pajamas were different from what she remembered wearing to bed. Brushing off this anomaly, she went to work in her car, which was parked where she had always parked, and it was the same office she had worked in for the last 20 years. On reaching her department, she realized that it was not her department. Her name wasn’t on the door of the cabin in which she worked in. She thought she was on the wrong floor, but no, it was her own floor. Confused, she went over to the office’s wireless section and looked herself up. Though she still worked there, but in another department, reporting to a superior she didn’t even know. So she went to the department indicated in the directory and left, citing illness. All the contents of her handbag were the same: her credit cards, her ID, everything, but she didn’t recall having changed departments at any time. She went to the social security doctor and underwent drug and alcohol testing. It came out all clean. She returned to work the next day and was able to make way by asking questions and saying that she wasn’t feeling well.
On returning home from the office that day, she looked at all the papers kept in the house and realized that they were unchanged. After realizing that something strange was going on, she thought it might be some form of amnesia and that perhaps something had happened to her and she couldn’t remember a period of her life. She logged on to the Internet and to her dismay, the day was as it should have been, and the major news items were the same as the day before.
To further complicate things, her partner, with whom she had been in a relationship for the past 7 years, and had been separated for the past 6 months, paid her a visit. He acted like the separation had never taken place. Lerina claims that she had been in a relationship with a fellow from her neighborhood and claimed that she knew him perfectly well, having been with him for four months. She knows his name, surname, address, where he works, his son from another relationship, and where he studied. But this new guy was nowhere to be found. Even after hiring a private detective, his whereabouts remained unknown. There was no trace of him at his alleged residence nor any trace of his family.
In the next few days, she came across small details in her life which she had no answer to, like clothing in her closet that she doesn’t remember buying, ticket stubs from various plays and movies she doesn’t remember going to etc. While it seems more likely that Garcia’s perceptions are the result of some neurological malfunction, she believes she woke up in a parallel universe. Unfortunately for the alleged dimensional traveler, Garcia has not been able to return to her normal universe, leaving her stuck in a dimension where she doesn’t belong to, and with a boyfriend, she can’t get rid of.
