My dreams have had sourness about them this year. A dour, depressed tincture of humiliation and disdain, but the source and the target of the disdain are unclear.

Wandering around a boatyard I happened to see an ex-girlfriend from when I first moved to New York. In reality I used to see her once and again for several years after our dramatic and constipated break-up, but in the boatyard it seemed, despite some familiarity, like we had never even met until this moment. She invited me into her house: a half-sunken boat in the Hudson River at 86th Street. It was not even a boat but a re-purposed truck or RV, most of it submerged in the Hudson with only the top windows above water. I said I did not feel safe in this vessel but she was nonplussed, saying she had lived in this vessel for all of the 15 years since we last met. I felt like the house would sink, and I climbed on to the roof, yelling “Mayday” and lecturing myself and my ex on maritime logistics, how no boat in the water would ignore a Mayday call.

The boat began to sink but in my hive of lies I instead announced that the land was rising. The boat sank into disappearing water, the vessel swallowed by a thick sheet of filthy sputum from the river floor. I climbed out and wandered a dark west side of Manhattan, re-visiting old haunts either out of business or closed to me.

Suffocation pervades these dreams, like claustrophobia from a film-noir mystery. Seemingly contradictory feelings of sharpness and depression press at the walls of my mind, these pointed impression forming wells at the bottom of larger areas. These recessions alter the ability of my mind to interact with itself. Strands of idea trail off in search of another, lingering as half-bloomed weeds in vacant allies.

It can take quite a bit of time to snap out of these dreams.