You look out the window again at the weedy yard. Yes, you think: he has done what it took to protect himself from these nightmares of his and neglected everything else. While in the meantime what really encroaches on the cabin is wilderness. Brambles and branches close in on the house, and eventually they will fold over it completely, subsuming it, the way that a tree’s bark flows over a nail. That is what the cabin reminds you of, in the end: a nail. Five rooms and a roof hammered into the heart of the forest, where they wait, with the patience of a nail, to become ingrown.

The dreamcatcher hangs from a thin string tied around a bent nail, which the owner has hammered slantwise into the white wood of the window’s lintel. Suspended in the center of the pane, the net is about the size of your fist, and it consists of a hoop of beige willow wood, encircling a mesh middle woven from some kind of synthetic nylon material. The threads—springy and white like basketball netting, and vertebrated with colored beads—overlap one another with the density of a spiderweb. Knotted in places are black crow feathers and pleached twigs that dangle in a fringe. The device, you know, is designed to catch and then neutralize nightmares. It is implicated, as an artifact, in systems of superstition that posit an exogenous source for dreams: some invisible stream or current, some river of imagery, that pours in like moonlight through the bedroom’s window at night, and from there into the sleeper’s ear. The dreamcatcher in the windowpane is meant to function as a filtration mechanism: letting through all the unpolluted, pleasant images, and collecting in its net any effluent of nightmare.

But this does not seem to be the system of superstition in which the owner is participating. If that were the case, a single dreamcatcher would suffice, strung up in the room in which he slept. Rather, the owner seems to have installed them according to a siege principle. In his sheer methodicalness, he could have been embattling his cabin against a mob. Not an inanimate nightmare, then, borne passively along on a stream of dream images, but an incubus: an active force, sentient and intent, determined to get inside the cabin. Probing the windowpanes for weaknesses at night, the blind groping of its dark hand. Every possible entrance has to be accounted for.

You support the hoop of the dreamcatcher in your palm, and the webbing goes slack and limp, draping over your hand like a bolas. When you play your fingers up and down, this tangles your hand even further. Clearly the owner is obsessed: paranoid, fixated, deluded on the matter of nightmares. But less clear, at this moment, are the particular beliefs that have structured that obsession, the private logic or mythology he has evolved. You have never had a nightmare that you still feared after waking—never one so vivid that it made you reluctant to go back to sleep, much less one that made you pace from room to room, hammering in place a barricade of dreamcatchers. Twisting your hand, you extricate it at last from the webbing and release the hoop. It clatters back in place against the glass.