The dream began when I became aware that I was not in pain, or not much — but only in the dream.

I was walking with high school friends when they veered off through a meadow where there were no visible paths and disappeared. We had been trying to get to a train station, and I was surprised by the detour. Shortcut?

I tried to follow their track and reached a point where it wrapped around a house. Only a few inches of ground and grass separated the house from a sheer drop into a gorge thousands of feet deep. I couldn’t walk on that — how could they have? Were they that much bolder? They had never been.

In front of the house was a sign like those you see at rural bars. “Not a good idea,” I thought. Alcohol, a precariously perched house, and death only a few inches and a few thousand feet away.