You stare at the six dark blotches on the grass, pretending they form an elaborate Rorschach test. To arrive at the same interpretation of their pattern as the owner, you must first imagine your way into the particular mythology of his madness. He believes himself to be in a life or death struggle with nightmare; he has barricaded his cabin comprehensively against it. At first you assumed that these silhouettes belong to the same defense system. But now you cannot shake the image that the owner, you feel sure, must have of them: anthropomorphic, minatory, what they most resemble are incubi. As if these are the very specters he has boarded himself up against.

Not scarecrows to scare away nightmares, but nightmares themselves. Each shadow a hypostatized nightmare. You are certain this is what the owner believes. On those mornings when he woke from a terrible dream, he must have waded out into the clearing with a can of spray paint. By casting his shadow on the ground, he must have imagined he was casting the nightmare from his body. And to complete this unhinged cleansing ritual, he crouched down and filled in the shadow’s outline with paint, wrapping the nightmare in black the way a spider wraps its prey in silk. Yes, he would have believed that the blackened ground was itself having a bad dream, coated with the terrors that had coated his mind. Contaminated. To you, of course, the grass blades seem blackened by nothing other than his madness. If they are coated with anything, it is with the thoughts he must have been thinking when he painted them. Moltings of his madness. Part exorcism and part ecdysis.

You reach out your hand toward the foot of one of them, as if to pet its black grasses. But almost immediately you think better of it. For this feels tantamount to plunging your hand into an anthill of insanity—your skin coated with the blackness that coats the grass, positively crawling with the thoughts that madden the grass. You snatch back your hand, as from a flame.

But that in itself is a mad thought. It is the kind of thought the owner would think. To prove this point to yourself, you force your fingers forward. You run their tips gingerly over the blackened grass. The blades are stiff and dry.

That night you have trouble falling asleep. You are lying on the owner’s mattress in the dark, staring out his bedroom window. You are not afraid of the dreamcatcher there, or of the six silhouettes lying beyond it in the yard. Rather, what unsettles you is the fact that the owner has installed them at all. You keep thinking: you are living in the cabin of a madman. You wonder: how long can you live in a madman’s home without going mad yourself?

You are not being superstitious, you do not think. It simply stands to reason. For it would be like sleeping in a house where a family has been slaughtered: whether or not you believe in ghosts, there is the atmosphere to consider. And here, in the cabin of a man who believes himself to be besieged, on every side, by nightmare—the atmosphere is bound to be tinged with insane energies. Before you arrived, the owner was living who knows how long alone between these walls. It is possible that he has polluted the very air with his madness.