Last night I had a dream about a one-legged man. Recovering from sickness in a high room, I watched him slowly set out from a house propped in a bog, along a pathway of buried stones. The bog was beautiful, so green it could have been real, and deep. The sky was pale and huge. I felt lucky to be there, but knew that someday the bog-man would miss and fall on his back, down between the stones as if into a deep green sleep. And of course he did; I watched him from my window, cursing my prohetic soul.
In the end it turned out to be a film, and all of us only players. My first clue was when someone yelled "Cut!" and the bog-man popped back out of the slimy water, swearing, and saying that it didn't work for him. I stayed in the false house, tugging at my costume, while someone went down there. The sky tore like a sheet. Worse yet, it became clear (as things become clear in a dream, like a stranger's face) that the film was based on a book which none of us had read. All the company of that dream-- a cook, a nurse, a bog-man now with two good legs-- sat with our coffee in invisible director's chairs, feeling strangely guilty, wondering what had been changed.