Godzilla, as well as the battle-royal entry Destroy All Monsters). Earlier in the week I had spotted the marathon’s listing in the latest TV Guide, a copy of which always lay on my parents’ coffee table. While I had never seen one of the Japanese Godzilla films before, I assumed he would be no less frightening (no less Deathlike a reptile) than his American counterpart. So when Saturday arrived I lay impatiently in bed until around midnight, after my parents had gone to sleep, and then crept out into the living room. The marathon’s inaugural entry (Godzilla) was already underway: the image onscreen, in grainy black-and-white, was a close-up of Godzilla’s face, the jaws of his snout—flat and sharp as a shovel—widened to emit his trademark roar. The sound of it was galvanizing (I lowered the volume so that it wouldn’t wake my parents). In that first flush of excitement, I was ready to stay awake all night, for the full eight hours of the marathon. In reality, I started flagging after thirty minutes, my head nodding against my will. I don’t remember when I fell asleep for good (at some point I was woken in the dark by my father, who turned off the TV and led me by hand back to bed), but I made it through at least two or three films in this half-conscious state, constantly jolting up and goggling my eyes. Eventually my mind must have become completely frayed with fatigue (the parentheses between dreams and waking turned permeable) because I could not blink even for a second without falling asleep. As soon as my eyelids lowered I began to dream, split-second dreams or micro-dreams, seamless continuations of whatever I had just been seeing. So if, with my eyes open, I saw on the television screen Godzilla lifting his leg to take a step, then the very moment that my eyelashes met I would see (or dream I saw) Godzilla lowering his foot to finish that step. And if, instead of jolting awake at this point, I simply kept on dreaming, then I would see Godzilla take another step, and another, leaving the television screen far behind him as he descended deeper into my mind. There, my unconscious would weave a dream around him, modeling it on the movie I had just been watching and so doing its best to construct a habitat amenable to the lizard, a kind of oneiric terrarium where Godzilla would not feel out of place. The settings of these dreams would be the same seaside cities that Godzilla had just, on the television screen, been terrorizing; and the characters of the dreams would be the same military personnel and scientists who, in the movie, had just been trying either to pulverize or to propitiate Godzilla; and Godzilla (oblivious that he had left behind his television habitat for my unconscious habitat: devoured live—so to speak—by my dreaming eye) would resume razing buildings and swatting at fighter jets without missing a beat.