“Every night,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “Every night. It’s gotten to the point where I start awake the moment I glimpse him. I can’t sleep for more than a few minutes at a time. I now have to fight to stay in the dream, and let him go on watching me, if I’m going to get any sleep at all—that’s the worst part. I’m being forced to surrender to him, otherwise I won’t be able to sleep.”

Amelia’s story troubled me, and for days after this conversation I wracked my brains for some solution to her problem. What if she were hypnotized before she went to sleep? Or if she were to take a medicine that would insure dreamless sleep? Should she go to an analyst, or to church? In time, I told myself in some ungenerous moments, when I had begun to irritate myself with futile speculating, she would get used to this disgusting, anonymous figure in her dreams. There’s nothing so terrible that people can’t get used to it. Some may even come to miss it when it’s gone. But then the image of this staring, nondescript individual, watching my oldest friend in her dreams, would come back to upset me—startling, disturbing—this ominous, uncertain malice, callous probing, brutal clinicalism, showing me the utter stupidity and pointlessness of all my well-intentioned suggestions.

Amelia’s problem was not one that had any practical solution; it was the kind of problem that is woven directly into someone’s very life. There are problems we solve and problems we live with, and when we see people who have learned to live with terrible problems, the ordinary way they have about them makes it easy for us to forget, or never to notice, the merciless persistence of the problem, the way its agony has made itself into the root and stone of an ordinary life. We want to think that adaptation is a cure, when in reality it isn’t even a palliative; it’s usually nothing more or less than the difference between death and being able to live in pain. Amelia had stopped visiting people, and now saw almost no one; how could she, when she could no longer find in sleep any respite from being seen? And even I began avoiding her, not that she was seeking me out much anymore, excusing myself with work that didn’t exist, responsibilities that didn’t exist. I think she appreciated that. At least she would be spared having to be seen by me.