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There are lost dreams. I dreamed I bought an SB600 flash. I dreamed of an attic with hardwood floors. I dreamed I dissected my left wrist. I nightmared the death of my dog, the death of my brother, the death of myself. These dreams all have winding, involved backstories, and when I wake up, if I turn my head before I’m fully awake, they’re gone, tipped with my turning head from whatever basin in my brain they’ve created for themselves and out into neural pathways, scattering like water on pavement. I remember small pieces, images without meaning, and focus on them with the sharp tool of concentration like a dentist scraping plaque from a molar. But usually, I lose them, and turn over in my mind so many times the fragments I have left that even these cease to become memories and instead are small, hard shards of fact: I dreamed I bought an SB600 flash. I don’t remember where I bought it. I don’t remember what I illuminated with it. I don’t remember how heavy it was in my hands. I only remember that I bought it. And the dream is lost.

I die in dreams and stay dead, without waking up. I fly and breathe underwater. I write in dreams. Take pictures. Become my camera lens. I quit my job and cut my hair and become a boy. I run and get nowhere. I cut my body up and it refuses to die. I get bitten by rabid animals with tiny, sharp teeth. I spread myself out like butter on an endless gray road. I hover over myself.

The people I love most rarely come into my dreams. Instead it’s the people I see at work, the girl I pass on the street, complete strangers. I dreamed a coworker volunteered on a construction site to repair a building after an earthquake. She climbed a scaffolding and threw down fifty-pound bags of concrete mix, kept working well past midnight to ease the splinters of reasonless guilt from her soul, and the next day at work I could hardly mumble hello to her when I passed her in the hall.