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I was always a city boy, and when I did find myself far out in the countryside, sometimes I would check the horizons to see if I’d reached a place where no human-made structure was visible in any direction.
In my dream, I was climbing a path in the hills and as I neared one summit I glanced around. All the foliage on all the hills was a thick and even-looking carpet, a uniform green on some hills, a uniform blue in others. Far away, there was some kind of tower or antenna.
I expected that in a while I’d see my wife and son mounting the path behind me, but a man by a nearby tree told me that there was no point waiting. They were no longer associated with me, he let me know. He communicated wordlessly. He had no mouth and indeed no face. His head was like smooth black marble, and tall.
He said there was no going back, and I protested that I still had things to do. I still had commitments. He said that those commitments all belonged to a certain self-contained context that I no longer inhabited. I had performed very well, he assured me, but I might as well forget about everything that had played out in my former environment. It no longer mattered.
But I wanted it to matter, and my resistance woke me up. Apparently I’d had my first experience with sleep apnea.