James Bond was being pursued through a large building, most likely a hotel. He stopped to remove his socks, probably just before he was captured. When I found them, I had the presence of mind to pick them up, realizing later that they were the reason that he was being hunted.

He escaped and found me, and I thought I was about to learn the secret of the socks when we heard a woman outside screaming, “Help me! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” A man in the room threw something to her — an inhaler? — but when she reached for it she lost her grip on the building and plummeted. A suspicion about the man flashed through my mind.

I couldn’t bear to look, but at the last moment I saw her hit a very crowded pool. The idea that she had been 14 stories up came to me, and I hoped that she would survive, unlikely as that seemed.

The swimmers had scattered with the impact, and when the body surfaced it was headless. Instead of a neck, however, there was a peg like the Fisher-Price Little People have.

To my horror, the body climbed out of the pool and — sadly and desperately, it seemed to me — began to look for its head, although it would do it no good. It found it, but instead of the head of a young woman, it was the distorted, plain head of a toy. Fretfully and absentmindedly, the body cleanly pulled off one of the puffy, exaggerated ears and seemed anxious to do more to it, but was stumped. It was awful to see and worse to think about, but I wondered what it could mean.