Given that these were the conditions under which I viewed that climactic battle between Mothra and Godzilla—hypnagogic and groggy—it’s no wonder that I can no longer remember the outcome. Even if the mites, the moth, and the gecko were to stage a perfectly faithful windowpane adaptation tonight—even if they were to behave exactly as their cinematic correlatives did—I would have no way of knowing. Watching them now, I rub my eyes to refresh myself, as if trying once more to stay awake for this movie. Of course, all I am really watching are some unsuspecting microfauna, comporting themselves in a thoroughly banal, nocturnal way: the moth resting, the mites fleeing, the gecko stalking and feeding. If the plotline of Mothra vs. Godzilla can be projected onto these activities, it is only because I myself am doing it. It is an adaptation staged by my eye (my two dark eyes, staring back at me from my reflection in the glass), or, more accurately, by my mind’s or my memory’s eye, which, like the astronomer’s eye, confronted with a night sky’s patternless points of light, casts constellations over all the chaos that it sees. (I remember my father teaching me the constellations in our backyard: he encouraged me to visualize those mythological silhouettes as nets, interpretive meshworks that could be cast over stars to ensnare them in narratives. As if astronomy were just a long slow mythological trawl, pulling in the heavy glittering, each night, of its mythological haul.) And how strange to think that my twelve-year-old self—fighting to stay awake throughout the conclusion of Mothra vs. Godzilla; falling asleep and dreaming brief Mothra vs. Godzilla dreams—was in a way preparing for a night like this one: when the same unconscious mechanisms that generated those Mothra vs. Godzilla dreams would be able to project them not onto the mind’s eye or an inner eyelid, but onto a second-story windowpane. For that is all that this window is: a kind of dream that I am having. The very moment that the gecko crawled onto the glass, I realize, it must have been entering its own oneiric terrarium. And presiding all the while over this terrarium—reflected in the windowpane, diffused throughout its surface, just as my identity would be dissolved through every inch of a dream—is my own face: huge, somber, and sleepless. Though the mites, the moth, and the gecko cannot see my face, it registers every movement of theirs in its transparent skin, which is as one with the glass that reflects it. Nothing steps that does not send a vibration through my face. Interestingly, however, none of the creatures have stepped yet onto my face. My reflection remains the leftmost element in the windowpane. Directly to my right, the moth is still perched in place, resting on its thin legs. Languorously it unfolds and refolds its brown wings, as if blinking. Directly to its right, a nebula of mites is just beginning to unfurl a tendril of gray dots toward its feet.