I had just come back from the library, where I had checked out a book, which was in liquid form. It was a completely clear, gel-like substance in a bottle, but I could see through the plastic that it was only partially full, and I worried that part of the book was missing. Then I found myself outside in my backyard under very bright sun talking to a stranger about the book. Even though I had no concrete memory of doing it, I suddenly realized that I had spread part of the liquid book onto a peanut butter sandwich. I also realized very abruptly that I had actually eaten part of this sandwich. I became very distressed at this idea, both because I worried that part of the book was now irretrievable, and because I thought that it might be toxic to consume. That night I found myself sitting in a second-story room in an unknown house. The room was both a study and a bedroom, and I sat on the bed trying to figure out how to read this liquid book. I finally decided to pour out a small section and spread it into a very thin layer. As I did so, words appeared, black text on a white background. I saw only a fragment of what looked like a page and was unable to read its contents, but I realized then that the missing drops of liquid would not be a problem after all, that the book was analogous to DNA in the sense that each drop contained the sequence for the entire book. This came as a great revelation, which finally set me at ease.
Cedar and I were walking down the driveway of the old house that we used to live in. We could see in through the back door that our former landlord was sitting alone in the kitchen looking sad. As we entered the kitchen, we saw that he had installed huge freezers full of ice cream. We asked him what was wrong, and he said that he had tried to open an ice cream shop in January, but that business was terrible because no one wanted ice cream in January. We felt bad for him but didn’t want any ice cream either, so we said, “Well, good luck with that,” and walked out sheepishly. Back at the other end of the driveway, a girl named Ginger who I went to high school with had pulled up in a pick-up truck. Somehow I knew that Ginger had been pregnant, but it turned out that she had had a litter of puppies instead of a baby. (The puppies looked just like my dog Talula’s litter.) As we were talking, she told me that it was time to wash the puppies. She pulled out an orange laptop computer, which she opened up and set on the ground. Then she put the puppies on it and started spraying them with water. She said, “Oh, these things are great. You can just get them all wet, and they still work fine.”
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