You toss about on the mattress and picture the owner lying here, as sleepless as you are. You think of the many nights he must have lain awake, meticulously constructing his mythology. For it is meticulous. He has devised rules, and then revised those rules: how the incubi operate and how the dreamcatchers work; what protocols need to be observed when stenciling the silhouettes. Indeed, what in reality he has built is a thought structure: hermetic, self-contained, freestanding. This is the house that his madness has constructed around itself; this is the web it has woven. And for who knows how long the owner inhabited it alone, the thought structure’s sole occupant: at once its dark architect, seated at the building’s center, and its dark spider, patiently spinning out its thread. Now that he is gone, this center is empty, but the vacant thought structure remains. Oblivious, you have wandered right inside it, like a visitor to the house, or, yes—why not say it?—like a fly into a web.

It seems unlikely that the owner was always mad. You doubt, for instance, that he arrived at the cabin and began installing dreamcatchers first thing, initiating the silhouette ritual first thing. Probably, he was mildly paranoid when he first retired here, and only after prolonged seclusion did his delusions worsen. For that matter, he may even have been perfectly sane when he arrived. Prolonged seclusion would warp even a perfectly sane person’s thought processes eventually. That is the nature of cabin fever: the isolation gets to you in its own good time. If the cabin does not drive you straight out of your mind—if you absolutely refuse to be driven out of your mind—very well: then the cabin will find a way of driving itself straight into your mind, implanting an insanity there itself. The insanity is simply a nail, but the cabin is the hammer.

And now here you are, alone not only inside the cabin, which hammers at you with cabin fever, but also inside the owner’s thought structure, which hammers at you with madness. The prudent thing would be to take your half of the stipend and abandon the position immediately. Already you are showing signs of strain, after all: that midnight access of irrationality at the mirror. But then again, on the other hand, there are only two months remaining. You can withstand two months. Two months is not nearly enough time for you to be driven mad. Now if you had to stay six months, maybe, a year. But two months?

You turn over in bed and stare at the ceiling. Your mind is racing. You cannot stop analyzing the relationship between architecture and psychology. Even at the etymological level, your mind cannot stop cataloguing all the terms that the vocabularies of architecture and psychology share. Entrance, for example. For while entrance is a psychological verb, referring to the process of hypnosis, it is also, at the same time, an architectural noun, referring to a point of ingress. To be entranced, psychologically, is to be pushed through the entrance of an alien thought structure. Hypnotized, you stand inside a new structure of thoughts, one that has been designed especially to encage you. Or the word threshold, a noun in both vocabularies. Threshold refers—psychologically—to liminality, the spaces between perceptual awareness. And yet threshold also refers—architecturally—to the doorways that separate distinct rooms. The thoughts you think in the bathroom differ qualitatively from the thoughts you think in the hall, and dividing these thought systems—no less than the physical spaces themselves—is a threshold. When you cross a threshold, psychologically, you are passing from one room of thought into another.