I was in Venice, staying at a hotel, and things started going terribly wrong. The streets were starting to be taken over with zombies from the military. Across a canal, I saw a campo filled with shouting people, flickering firelight from torches and a sign about the junta. People were screaming and running.

I was carrying my harp over my head, and a man came by and offered to help me carry it. He seemed friendly enough, so I let him follow me to the hotel with the harp hoisted above him. I started to have my doubts when we got to the hotel. I was trying to be quiet, to avoid attracting attention, but he was strumming the harp and singing tunelessly to himself. I tried to get rid of him.

The hotel was a grand turn-of-the-century affair, with polished dark wood bannisters and big dark gilt-framed mirrors on the red velvet walls. I grabbed my harp and went bounding down the curving marble stairs, leaping over entire flights to land on the soft Oriental carpet of each landing below. I was with Rahul now.

Then we saw Angela and her baby. Angela’s hair was a more uniform, soft dark gray than I remembered. We hugged tight for a moment, then started trying to find my hotel room, where we could hide out for a while. There were ghouls cominng in through the front door and congregating near the entrance, just a flight of stairs below us. We snuck quietly up the stairs down the dark hallway to where my room should have been.

It wasn’t there. We stood there for a moment, upset.

“There’s another wing!” I hissed, suddenly realizing that the hotel was like a topsy-turvy hall of mirrors, with one hallway linking the normal hotel to its reverse side, the side full of zombies. We started running back down the hall, trying to leave behind the loud man who had been carrying my harp.

For context: I don’t have a harp. Angela doesn’t have a baby. The Thai government was toppled by a military coup a few days ago, with tanks rolling through the streets of Bangkok. I called Angela a few days ago but left a message and haven’t heard back from her or met up since we got to Bloomington. I tried to take a harp class at the community center last Monday, but couldn’t find it. Although the setting and plot of my dream evoke Resident Evil, or Castlevania, or Silent Hill, I haven’t been playing any of those games lately. However, we were up late last night discussing various real-life boogeymen–baldness, diabetes, cancer–and afterwards I couldn’t sleep for hours, so perhaps my brain sublimated these fears into a more exaggerated and concrete form?

Lost in Chicago, I didn’t remember when my flight was, or on what airline. It was cold and gray and foggy–romantic, almost.

I was in a bar with P. and he offered to pay, then started complaining about how much everyone had drunk. I got mad at him and told him that either we’d go Dutch or he would shut up. He was puking blue liquid in a corner as I said this.

I had married a rich but controlling Saudi man. I tried now to escape from his palace, but it was so hard, so full of traps, doorknobs with rows of razors on them like the julienning blades of a mandoline.