The woman was either out of her mind or trying to cause a scene, or maybe both. That was when she was certain that in addition to dreaming the manager’s dream, she’d dreamed that woman’s. She also knew that even the nightmares with giant baby carrots and other foodstuffs were not based on her personal experiences but those of some rep staying there during a trade fair whose expense account didn’t stretch beyond the unexceptional hotel dining room. She imagined a bald man with round eyes, approaching retirement age. She imagined him as deeply embittered, with bushy, arched eyebrows that disguised the pained expression on his face. She imagined that the rancid mushroom reminded him of his dried-out relationship with his wife: they both took away his appetite and put him in a bad mood.

Her dreams expanded. A single night would include several different guests, and in the mornings she’d try to work out which of them were the shadows that had stationed themselves at her bedside…which was the middle-aged woman from Andalusia who’d promised to be back in a moment but then disappeared, giving rise to a sexy chase scene involving the presumably male dreamer. She wasn’t always sure about their gender, as if it made no difference to those unconscious minds. And she was never certain whether, for example, the children were the sons, granddaughters, cousins, or even siblings of the sleepers. Sometimes it was all quite boring, nothing more than reproductions of humdrum days: the bustle of the toy fair with a backdrop of dancing dolls; a car trip with a stop at a Monegros rest area; hurried attempts to pack a suitcase that was constantly changing shape.

Trying to sort out whose dreams were whose was exhausting. She knew both a lot and nothing at all about the dreamers. If she came across the man who night after night dreamed about a woman, possibly his mother, who was always humiliating him, all she’d discover about him was some everyday conflict. What these people were hiding, and what she herself was hiding from others, were ordinary problems, and only the fact of not speaking about a common ailment, or taking it too seriously, made it an anomaly.