In my dream it’s morning and we take our places in the dim reading room, row on row. Books and clipped articles are passed. The light is granular. We wet our fingers, scan pages, murmur. There is conflict and later, we are starved in our seats.

In my dream my new house in Mexico City is huge but so full of hazards, like the preserved scorpions that might still be alive. As  day dawns, we circle the corridors, counting off rooms and gradually coming to love it.

In my dream I am at what I know to be a “traditional Indonesian play”: painted wooden sets that slide from the front to the back of the stage as performers in bright costumes covered in shivering silk tassels sing in deep voices and martial rhythms.

In my dream I suggest the eight of us have a slumber party in the station wagon since we are already packed in it.

In my dream the office building has overlapping departments with glass dividers. At one I’m given a celebratory bowl of ramen while we cross out the old phone numbers.

In my dream there is collision of bodies in a long low room, there is dance, there is castration.

In my dream I am like a collapsed white bird sprawling across lower Manhattan streets.

In my dream we lock ourselves in individually but that won’t keep us alive. The many layers of green paint on the walls have buckled and rotted.

In my dream the back wall contains strand by strand instructions for how to spin a spider web.

In my dream I agree to play them a country record from the 60’s but to find it I have to root around in the concrete bulkheads up and down the street.

In my dream I can’t afford to buy the building and when I look I’m wearing a small swim suit and cut away shorts so it’s out into the night streets of downtown Brooklyn with J to try to find at least a pair of sweatpants but the crowds are rowdy which makes J impatient when I demand that they hold my hand for safety in the jostling darkness.