‘OK. I wrote everything I could remember in here. Let me look at my notes. So, here we go. In the dream there’s a room. It’s like a practice room, with soundproof walls and a piano and some music stands. Like the ones they had in Toronto where I trained. I’m in there tuning my harp, but the low D won’t stay in. The tuning peg is wobbly, even though in the dream I can remember having it fixed recently. I’ve got this big canvas tote bag that my mom bought me from the Smithsonian gift shop, with all my music and stuff in it, and for some odd reason I have pitch pipes – which nobody uses any more, but it’s a dream. So I go to get the pitch pipes and there’s a—’

She stops and an abstracted expression comes over her face.

‘No, it’s not like that. Well, I can’t quite remember how, but suddenly this guy is just there, he says he’s going to fix the harp but he tries to steal my bag.’

‘Your bag with your music in?’ She nods. ‘All right, go on.’

‘So, at first I let him take it because I’m so surprised, and then I think hang on, I need those scores because we’re rehearsing tomorrow – and in the dream somehow I’m still in school, and if I lose the sheet music I’ll be in trouble, and I’m getting really upset.’

‘Of course.’

‘So I run out of the room after him, but we’re not at the conservatory any more, we’re outside on this scaffold, like a . . . what do you call it? Like a gangway. Up in the sky. I look down and I can see all these canals with boats on them, and instead of roads there are these scaffolds way up high with walkways made of boards. The city below us has so many lights, and the architecture is sort of futuristic, a bit like Singapore – but it isn’t any real place that I’ve ever been, and I’ve been a lot of places. The buildings are much taller. So he’s running ahead of me with the bag, and I have to chase him. And I’m wearing heels.’

‘Oh, I hate that,’ I say. But Singapore? A city with canals . . .

‘I know, right? So I was kind of mad by then. Well, not really mad, but more panicked because I had no clue what I was going to do if I didn’t get my scores off of him. I chased him and he was just about to go into this tall building with a giant tulip out front, and I grabbed the back of his jacket and stopped him, and the bag of sheet music spilled. It went everywhere. It floated down into the canals and it blew around in the wind— Oh, I’ve got a note here – there was this hot wind, like a blow dryer, or when you walk over a subway grate in New York.’