The cracks in the ceiling turned into patterns, the patterns turned into shapes of people and animals, and after a time the people and animals began to move, having nothing to do with me for I was just a spectator, but moving among themselves, flowing toward each other and then away, making silent transactions just with each other. It seemed to me that there were animals from everywhere, although I couldn’t distinguish if it was the same with the people. There was a groundhog, I remember, and a smaller shape that looked like a skunk, with the flung-up tail, a misshapen giraffe with a cock-eyed neck, and what might have been a hippopotamus or an enormous odd bull, and among them all the people, who seemed to melt and float with the animals, not as if they were in charge but as if they were part of the whole collection.

I watched them for a long time, and then I went to sleep again and it seemed as if the sleep was the same as the being awake, for the same forms were in the dreams, with the same flowing, floating movements, doing the same dream-like things, without discernible purpose. It went on and on like that, waking, sleeping, the same figures, and after a while I was no longer a spectator but one of them, moving in and out of them, all of them flat, one-dimensional, outlines only and I was that way, too, without substance; and in the same way that their shapes were without dimension, so were their spirits, so that they moved without time or space or joy or sadness or any emotion. I was in it too, only it was not an “I” that was there, just a form, no personality or feeling, just the floating outline, and it was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, for there was no such thing here, there was just the business of floating, touching, moving apart, floating, touching, and moving apart. Like gentle bump ’em cars we moved, and I was on the ceiling too except that it wasn’t the ceiling any more, it was everywhere, and sometimes I was asleep and sometimes I was awake and neither was different from the other.