I am in a small, one level house, with low ceilings. It’s basically a bed & a kitchenette. The front of the house has one window, right next to the front door. There is no yard & the door opens right onto the street—a busy, cobblestone, British looking kind of street. It’s morning & I’m in bed with Camilla I., half asleep. The bed is right against the window so that all that separates us & the street is a pane of glass & a thin white curtain.

A mailman taps on the window, waking us up. Camilla & I are both naked, so I star t struggling to get my feet untangled from the sheets & get something wrapped around my waist at the same time, while the mailman keeps tapping. We can see him through the thin cur tain & he looks amused at my predicament; he can tell that both of us must be naked & is laughing quietly at us, but not in a cruel way. We can also see now that he is very handsome. He basically looks like Josh Har tnett with longer hair (which is apparently my brain’s definition of handsome). Finally I get out from the covers & have a piece of sheet covering my private bits & I open the door which is right beside the window, & he hands me a little slip saying that I have a parcel waiting at the post office. He is still kind of laughing at me. I turn around & Camilla is standing behind me, wrapped in a blanket & smiling. The mailman leaves & walks across the cobblestone street chuckling.

I ask Camilla: If it was so easy for her to get out of bed, why didn’t she answer the door in the first place? I accuse her of deciding to get up only once she saw how handsome the mailman was. She says no, she was just trying to answer the door like I was & we both happened to get up at the same time. She says I am being silly. But really, the mailman was pretty handsome, so I don’t know...

Back under the covers, we decide to watch the TV at the foot of the bed. There is a documentary showing, but everything occurring on the screen is from a dream that I was having before the mailman woke us up (dream within a dream). Now I’m seeing the dream again on the television, like a rerun, in my brain, so that as I watch I know in advance everything that’s going to happen & what the narrator is going to say.

The documentary is about an old cannon that has been discovered on the bottom of the ocean. It is a special cannon. Its very existence, in some dream-logic way, is proof of the theory that people once magically floated these cannons on the tops of clouds. The screen shows a reenactment of the cannon floating on a cloud. It is a strange object, black & leaden, oversized, & with many elaborate designs & moving components running along the barrel. Then we see the cannon become too heavy, fall through the cloud, & tumble through the sky. On its way down it hits the wing of an old WWII era jet plane. The plane spins out of control, but then saves itself by morphing into some sor t of snake-plane with overlapping metal scales on its sides, allowing it to twist itself around in the air, back into an upright, forward flying position. We see a childish, smiling face on the front of the plane as it banks away out of sight.

Now we see the cannon again. It falls past the backdrop of a cityscape & down into a harbor of green murky water. It is believed that this is the same cannon they’ve discovered on the harbor floor, & that its existence proves everything reenacted on the screen actually happened.

The documentary ends. I am still in bed, but Camilla is up. She is working with some appliance that is powered by boiling water. As soon as she turns it off, the water stops boiling. Then I look out the window to see a small girl staring at me through the glass. She is standing on a chair or something so that she’s high enough to see inside. There is a sense of something supernatural going on; a sense that she is not what she appears to be. I point at her & yell, “There’s a little kid out there!”