I was in a college dormitory with my parents (who were not my actual parents) and a female student (who was not my roommate). The room was small and dark, and, although I thought it was supposed to be private, there were three single beds close together at angles in a corner. The area started to remind me of the trailer’s extra room, with its heavy orange drapes closed. I felt vaguely puzzled and disturbed.

I found myself wandering around outside and realized that I didn’t need to be at college at all — that I already had a degree and could not afford to take another year of classes just for the sake of it. I thought perhaps I was there to earn a master’s degree, but I couldn’t be sure and didn’t know what it would be in.

I could see two people dressed in 1950s clothes in a 1950s-style room, fighting. They may have been my parents in the dream. It looked like a scene from a B-movie. My imagination left them for a while, then returned, dreading what it would find — I expected to find the woman strangled. Instead, the man was lying partly sideways across a sofa, his eyes open, quite dead. The woman was half lying, half sitting on a chair, her eyes closed, but she was breathing faintly and regularly and seemed to be coming around. I was shocked yet not surprised that she had been the victor and that she had killed the man. I realized that that was what I had really expected.