“That’s not quite the problem, though,” she said. “My dreams are the same as they’ve ever been, as far as I can remember; I still dream about ordinary everyday things, but—you know how it is—it’s as if, while you are in your waking state, your attention holds everything, all the objects and people, the world as it pertains to you, in their usual places, but, when you fall asleep, your attention slackens its grip on those things, and they drift away from their spots and into different relations with each other. The dream is the story these things tell when they get scrambled up, usually, although sometimes you get a special dream that seems so far-fetched you can’t begin to trace it back to any ordinary thing. In all my dreams now, I think, all the ones I remember, there’s someone I don’t know, that I’ve never seen before. It isn’t a stranger or someone I’ve forgotten; I know I’ve never seen this person before in my life, except in other dreams. I know it, just as I know when I am introduced to someone that I have not been introduced to them before, the way I just know that I don’t know them at all, even by appearance, even as a figure in the background. So, I know this person is not known to me at all except in my dreams.”

“What does he look like? It is a he?”

“Yes. Well… There’s nothing wrong with his appearance, but his eyes, or the way he watches, keeps me from being able to understand his appearance; I couldn’t describe him to you except in generalities.”

“Did something happen around the time you started seeing this person?”

“Nothing, nothing,” she shakes her head decisively, but without energy. “I can’t even recall when exactly I first saw this person in a dream. I tell you, there is nothing in the world, in my waking life, that would put him in my dreams.”

“And he menaces you?”

She remains silent for a moment, her eyes closed, her hand over her brow.