Many people lived with me in one of the old band houses. College kids. There was some concern that bills would not get paid and things would get turned off. I had to explain to them all one morning, as I lay in bed, that the band had taken care of these things before and I’d make sure they would still. There was so many tenants now, though, I thought—maybe everyone could contribute a couple of dollars a month?

I had befriended a cabbie of Middle Eastern origin who was now bedridden, and from time to time I’d visit him in his apartment in midtown Manhattan. On this occasion he told me a parable, or a joke, or whatever you want to call it, about a spiritual seeker who decides he’s transcended whatever there is to learn in his holy book, so he burns it. “But he should have just put it up on a shelf,” the cabbie said. “What’s wrong with burning it?” he asked. I answered, and he spoke the words with me: You can’t unburn it. I hugged him and wished him well. Now I had to figure out how to get home, and I was in London, not New York City, and home was Paris.

At a bar with P. C. In reply to something he said, I remarked that I was just another white guy in a blue shirt. There were these other guys at our table and I said, “I guess we’re all just white guys in blue shirts,” and one of them called me an idiot because his shirt was more of a green-blue. P. C. added up the tab, which was a very complex sort of ledger, with rows indicating numbers of each drink ordered. He did the math quickly, and in the dream it occurred to me that he used to struggle with math. “Yeah, that was because of the plague,” he said. “The bubonic plague. But I’m better now.” The guys at our table were bearded hipsters, and they were ironically eating classic Drake’s Cakes—Funny Bones, I think. They lived in the renovated top floor of a nearby building, the rest of which was gutted, with empty windows. We could see it right across the street from the bar. P. C. got right near me and I thought I’d make a joke: “I’m afraid you can hear the voices inside my head,” I said, then covered my mouth coyly, like I was really shy about what those voices might be saying. The table erupted in laughter.