Then the dream began to recur in variation. At first it was animals: a short-finned pilot whale, a horned ghost crab, its antennal eyes scanning me like prey, its clawspan as broad as my own. A week when every night saw a different kind of corvid, eyeing me with apprehension or disdain. Cephalopods, ctenophores, these last soothing in their intricate symmetry. Over time, heterokonts began to make an appearance, then plants, at first bryophytes and lycopods, at length trees: a Montezuma cypress, a cluster of scrubby junipers, a deodar, a red pine, a stand of spotted gum. One night a kitchen knife appeared, a santokubōchō, the three-pointed all-purpose knife favored by every chef or would-be chef, myself included. The santokubōchō did not move — even the trees had moved, shivering or swaying as if in a breeze. It simply lay there, though there was no indication of any surface beneath it, no shadow, say, no directional quality, in fact, to the light it appeared to be bathed in. So perhaps you’d do better to imagine it floating rather than lying. Either way, it was outwardly inert — and yet it had a presence, it felt like a familiar. In the dream I reached out to grasp its handle, the stippled grain of cherry, smoothed and molded as if by long association with a hand, perhaps my own — though it was clear the image of the knife was way too big for me to grasp if it had emerged from the wall, as long from its tip to the base of its handle as the crab had been wide.