I was in some sort of training school. We were cut off from society and meant to learn some secret arts to fight some secret villain. There was a grand old library lit with white winter light. It was perhaps like a castle. As always, I felt excluded even in this community of fighters and learners. There was a bit where I was out on a balcony high up in the snow-topped mountains. One of my fellow students was trapped in the stone of the amber-colored floor. The other students had immediately given up on him as dead and unsurprised that the floor had eaten him. He was laid out just under the surface of the floor and, by instinct rather than by any instruction, I pulled back the floor from his face. The floor pulled back like a viscous honey. The trapped boy’s nose and mouth were exposed and he found his breath again.

I notice that I have this sort of dream often where I am simultaneously part of and excluded from a community and where I do well or do badly because I don’t understand the rules.

Another dream. Or a variation of the first one. I’m in a school. It’s Friday I suppose. I remember this only by later testimony. I’ve discovered there is a dead body in the classroom. But, in later testimony, I found the dead body on a Thursday but the teacher ignored me. It wasn’t until I raised the problem again, on the Friday, that the teacher paid me any attention. Well clearly the dead body was inconvenient to the teacher. As the one who discovered it, it became my responsibility to remove it. I took it to another house. There was a woman – I believe she was both the teacher in this dream and in the former dream – and the corpse remained highly inconvenient. I remember that I needed to transport it to yet another house. In the meantime the teacher had assumed some responsibility with me in delivering the body. With no instruction to do so she cut up the body quickly – it was as if it were off stage – I don’t remember any of the blood or bone cutting or tools; she had cut up the body and somehow managed to get an entire person’s corpse into a brown paper bag not much larger than you might carry your lunch in.

I had to transport the bag to another house. Now this house was a very specific house from my childhood, a friend of my brother’s, and I don’t remember that I have ever been in that house, but there it was. I don’t know why it should have been that house, a house entirely unremarkable in my memory. It was a house but it was also a police station. The walk was insignificant from the house I was already in. Across a highway, through the alley beside the church, and down a back alley just a few feet, and there I was at the police station house. I took my burden with me. I got to the house and went in. But somewhere I had misplaced the bag which contained the body. I don’t know how I could have lost it. I had had it with me on the front step but once I got into my final destination the bag was thoroughly and irretrievably lost.

Of course with the bag and the body gone, there was no evidence and the police were very sore at me that I had wasted their time. Nobody, not the police, not the teacher, not even I, had any sort of concern that somebody was dead.