To view this photo essay in order, please start here.

I dreamed I was on a road trip to Michigan with my physical therapist. We rode in a convertible with the top down, and the trees were bare like it was December, but the air was warm. The roads we drove on were lined with water fountains, like the kind you find on playgrounds—green metal stands, shiny basins, foot pedals.

I dreamed my grandmother shrank to the size of an infant, but with a doll’s delicate proportions. My mother held her in her arms and cried as my grandmother’s head fell off. I saw this peculiarity happening and knew it was strange, but it didn’t have the aspect of horror for me that it did for my mother. Strange and disgusting substances began to ooze from the bits that had been my grandmother, from the stump of her neck and from the base of her bodyless head. My mother continued to cry as I picked up my grandmother’s head and held it back on her body. The body was still breathing, the lungs visibly drawing in air. A coworker came to help me hold my grandmother’s head on the body, explaining to me as we worked around the brown ooze of grandma guts that her own baby had somehow gotten stuck halfway through a brick wall and had required removal with a bulldozer that had a special attachment for performing delicate operations—or, operations at least more delicate than dozing bulls.

I dreamed of hidden rooms every night for a week. I wandered through houses, always found myself looking out a window I hadn’t seen from the outside. Sometimes, the windows showed things outside you couldn’t see from any of the other windows. In an old cape cod, painted blue, I looked out a white-framed window down into a chasm of rock with rushing white water at the bottom. Every other view out the house’s windows showed the tree in the front yard, the flat green of the lawn. The mailbox at the end of the driveway.