Lately I’ve been remembering only snippets or ideas from dreams rather than details. In one last week, I was shocked to learn that my brother is James Bond, but I couldn’t ask him because it didn’t seem natural to ask a spy if he’s a spay and because in the back of my mind I thought I was James Bond. He also seemed more like a stranger to me than my brother, although I would experience moments of familiarity.

In another dream, I was a passenger on a bus where odd things were happening and which seemed to go nowhere even as it traveled. Although it was a tour bus, it would stop regularly at bus stop signs like any municipal bus. I wondered why I was in it.

Sunday I was the leader or part of a team delivering lawn furniture and ornaments to a family. Their house was familiar to me; I had been in it before, I recalled, and it was not what it appeared to be, but was a place of space and time shifts. Our lawn furniture and ornaments were not what they appeared to be, either, and one of us, perhaps me, apologized to the man of the house for the lateness of their delivery and tried to convince him of their normalcy by selling him on their superiority. “Look,” we told him, “You wouldn’t expect something like this to reflect and shine [this seemed to be an important property], but it’s made of a special material that has the reflective qualities of metal.”

They looked to me for proof, and I searched frantically for a flat reflective surface among the pieces in my load. There was a crescent of one on some kind of tray or ornament with a Christmas theme. I became fascinated and never learned if any of this fooled the man, or what the stuff really was or why we needed him to accept it.

It seems I dreamed a week of intrigue and subterfuge.