Among the observations that could nearly convince me of the substantive reality of dreams is the recurrance of certain landscapes. These places, which ought to be as plastic as pure thought, retain their names and their shapes from night to night. Though weeks and months of unremembered nights interrupt my visits, I always recognize them when I return. That is, they are not recurring dreams in the Freudian sense, for they come infrequently, and my tasks and aquaintances always vary. These places usually bear a superficial connection to the physical world. There is Manhattan, but a Manhattan of some near or distant future, its bedrock transected and tunnelled by underground freeways, its buildings lowered into the earth so that the surface is long tree-lined avenues and glassy sculpture. Across the river from this Manhattan is a New Jersey like something out of a Gene Wolfe novel: impossibly tall cliffs infested with a riot of trees. Or Boston, a wide and sprawling city of subway stations and dark cobbled streets. An apartment there that I often visit, with an entrance reached by a fire escape; an apartment in which I know I used to live. It is a Boston reached only by trains: when I try to walk away I find that gravity grows weaker and weaker the farther I venture into the suburbs. More rarely I visit London, a London of bright arcades like Leicester Square. Drowned docks, buildings on stilts, invaded by an encroaching ocean.

What are these places? The confused mosaic of my spatial memory, filled with memories of reality and a thousand novels, equally insubstantial? An underworld, the next life, a parallel universe? There are stranger things, Horatio.