When I was a kid, lots of my nightmares had the same recurring theme.

I’d be plunked into a situation where I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Maybe everyone expected me to do something or to know something, but I had no idea what it was. Maybe I didn’t know who any of the people around me were, but they knew me.

Occasionally, I’d realize I was dreaming, and try to convince everyone else in the dream. Of course, they didn’t believe me.

But something like that could never happen in real life, right? That’s what I thought too.

Fast forward to fall 2017, when I was twenty years old and living in Mexico.

One day, I was walking around the streets near my house, as I often did. I don’t remember what I was doing that particular day. It’s not important.

As anyone who knows me could tell you, I tend to lose myself in a daydream and wander about aimlessly without taking much notice of my surroundings. This day was no exception.

First, I walked past a young guy, and he tried to talk to say something to me. I didn’t hear him, because I had my headphones in, so I moved them to behind my ears. My Spanish wasn’t the best out of context back then, so I still couldn’t work out what he was saying. Anyway, it didn’t seem like he wanted to engage me in a conversation. I moved on.

The next person I walked past also tried to talk to me. Still didn’t hear what they said. At this point, I was getting freaked out, so I took my headphones off to pay more attention to what was going on.

The next time a person approached me, I was on high alert and determined to understand them. This time, I at least managed to make out a couple of words: ‘medicina’ (medicine) and ‘fábrica’ (factory). At least, that’s what I thought they were saying — it made absolutely no sense, so I assumed I’d heard them wrong. But why was everyone trying to talk to me anyway?

I was a very obviously foreign girl in the middle of a predominantly Mexican city, so I was used to attracting plenty of stares, and from time to time strangers would strike up a conversation with me.

But this was different. Every single person I walked past in the street was trying to talk to me, and they all seemed to be mentioning the same thing. Something that sounded like a ‘fábrica de medicina’.

There was an old woman sat on a bench, and she looked up at me as I passed her. I half-expected her to explain to me what was going on and what I had to do — as if I was a character in a film.

She didn’t. She just said something about medicine.

“Everyone I’ve walked past here has said the same thing to me but I don’t understand what you’re all talking about,” I said to her, desperate for some kind of answer. She just smirked and turned away from me. I didn’t get the joke.

I stopped for a moment to observe my surroundings. It might have just been my mind playing tricks on me, but there was a somewhat eerie feel to the place. There was almost nobody about, and they all seemed to be lingering. Yet I’d been here many times before and had never experienced anything like this.

We’ve all heard about those psychological studies that show human judgment is highly dependent on social cues and the environment. That people can be tricked into believing anything if enough people around them believe it, even if it’s obviously false.

That’s how gaslighting and cults of personality can function. But I’d never really ‘got it’ — until that afternoon.

Suddenly, I felt like I couldn’t be certain of anything. Was I really where I thought I was? Was there something weird about the way I’d dressed? Had I just wondered into another dimension?

Highly strung and freaked out, I walked back to my house as fast as I could. After turning a few corners, it seemed like everything was ‘back to normal’. People stopped looking at me and asking me the same questions.

By the time I got to my house, the whole incident felt like a distant dream. Nothing bad had happened to me — maybe I’d been a little melodramatic. Maybe I’d just imagined it all. I shrugged it off and went about my day.

But that evening, I spoke to my housemate about my strange experience.

“Do you think there’s anything — like, strange — about the way I look today?” I asked him.

Slightly bemused at my question, he confirmed there wasn’t. So I told him a lot of people had been staring at me and saying the same things.

“What did they say?” he asked me.

“I’m not sure,” I admitted; “but it sounded like they were asking me about a medicine factory. I might have heard them wrong.”

He looked at me strangely.

“Where were you?”

“You know, the streets near here,” I named the specific ones.

“I think you might have heard them right. There are always people selling drugs there…”

It turned out I’d been taking the ‘medicine factory’ too literally.