My older sister bought a guitar and strung it up weird. I was trying to fix it.

I had befriended the sixth man on the New York Knicks. I was walking with him from practice to the locker room. I don’t know if I was a reporter or what.

My colleague was trying to reach me in the middle of the night, telling me there was work to do. I replied with some difficulty, the email breaking up as I wrote it. I was practicing guitar in bed. My parents each came in and told me to stop, that I had to sleep.

The band was recording in a house somewhere—not the band house. I forgot my guitar of course. We worked on a song of mine. I wanted it to have a loungey feel. C. W. hummed a bit of “The Girl From Ipanema” and I said yeah, that’s it. As I was demonstrating the song I had the disconcerting feeling that I was making it up as I went.

My workplace was a chatbot development shop. We hired someone new and sure enough, I’d worked with him somewhere before. It was the type of thing where we barely recognized each other, but we did. We were in a large and sinister building, with several levels deep below ground that we didn’t have access to. Who knows what went on down there. One of my colleagues was talking about a new book by Wally Lamb in which the protagonist is a writer who tricks the entire community of writers’ agents somehow. I was testing one of the bots I had coded and the word “almost” was synonymous with the word “home.”

I stopped at a rest stop along the highway. Two men in line for food inside appeared to be prisoners. They were saying something like, “That one’s for me, that other one’s for you.” I realized they were talking about women at a whorehouse that had been set up out back. Later in the dream I was recalling the dream itself to certain people who had been in the dream.

We were on vacation at a beach. I had packed extravagantly but had forgotten my sandals. There was talk of going home briefly on the first day and I was hoping we could get them. I found myself in an office in a building on a sprawling campus. I had the feeling I was in a TV show. A man was telling me that all of human knowledge and experience was located here, within a sculpture of a brain that was set onto a table. I contemplated it with awe. Suddenly another man walked into the office and I knew he was the personification of that knowledge.

We were on our way out of a vacation home, packing and locking up. We went to a restaurant for a final meal. I got most of my dish, a mixed salad, to go. Then I spilled it as the next guests sat at our table. Some landed in a woman’s handbag and I apologized. I realized I’d forgotten some things at the house—my phone, some other things—and I told S. to wait for me. I realized it was taking me a long time.