I had a new job where I worked at a desk that was side by side with others, like those of Mary and Murray on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Although management didn’t like it, we kept rearranging them like my college roommates and I used to — facing each other, at right angles, and so forth.

I seemed to be doing well, although I worried a great deal about approvals. One day when I was wearing a favorite dress (in reality, one that has been donated because the style is too young for me), I was horrified to notice in a mirror that, while it didn’t show anything else, somehow it was sheer enough to show that I was wearing a bright white bra. I was mortified, but no one seemed to notice. If they did, they appeared to accept me rather than judge me. I felt strange and wondered how long it would last.

I went home and found that a man who’d been haranguing people in the street was looming in my front window, still shouting, but not at me personally despite the proximity. When I went around the corner to the front door, where he would not be able to see me (unfocused as he was), I found three strangers huddled there, also trying to escape him. Did they think it was natural to walk into a stranger’s house under the circumstances? I accepted this and talked to them. I don’t know why we were afraid of being observed by the man’s unseeing eye.

I was at a performance or award ceremony in what I perceived to be my father’s garden. All around me were trees, flowers, and grasses, and I felt supremely happy.

I went for a walk, and as I strolled about I noticed the landscape changing. Space was shrinking, and the trees, flowers, and grasses were being replaced by stones, walls, and other hard, colorless barriers. My formerly idyllic universe was changing, shrinking, and hardening, even as I walked through it. I felt as though I could panic at any moment when I realized the alterations were permanent and irrevocable. I couldn’t breathe.

I found myself in a cave, clinging to a 160-foot smooth wooden pole that was larger at the top, like a baseball bat. I didn’t know how I could have gotten up there, but I told a man across the way that I could slide down. He advised strongly against this plan, but I let myself go just as I woke up.

I was standing up with the Beatles, all four, who were performing live. As with all my dreams, I found myself there suddenly and didn’t know why or what to do. i tried to keep to a small side area I thought to be off camera. I could imagine the resentment if I appeared to mar the reunion.

After an uncomfortable time, I noticed there was an audience, a congregation at a synagogue. I was their rabbi and was expected to play a traditional instrument. I may have surprised myself by being able to, unusual for me in a dream.

At a banquet hall, I walked past a table where TB was seated. He was quiet, but his companions were discussing girls’ names, coming up with all kinds of dreadful contortions. The only one I could think of was “Anne,” so I suggested it casually without appearing to notice him. TB stirred, seemed to look at me, and to my shock threw in his contribution: “Diane.”

Outside, I saw an entire orchestra roll by, each member strapped to an appropriately sized single wheel. I marveled at the wonder and incongruity, then noticed a violinist for whom it seemed especially dangerous. Some threatened others by rounding corners at too much of a tilt. All were riding toward an apocalyptic sky.

It was then I realized I, in my form as the musical rabbi, was supposed to be leading them.

During a rare afternoon nap, I went back to college, was victimized by an administration prank, pushed flatboats that were underwater further underwater, noticed I had nothing with me, realized that skipping a year I would be graduating with strangers, listened to the agony of a boy in love, and horrified my mother with my apparent lack of underclothes. Busy afternoon.

I was back at college for a fifth year, this time because I had skipped a year. A couple of boys and I were waiting in a small Gothic-style room, where we heard strange voices and witnessed strange movements. At last a door opened behind us, and a dart flew past us and landed with a hard thwack in the opposite wall. Although it had come from behind, I knew it was no supernatural agency because somehow I had seen the dart thrower — a boy from my high school. Even more odd, the college boys who couldn’t have seen him either and who had never been to my high school recognized and named him. As we tried to open various doors, all locked, to escape, they told me this was all an administration ploy to see how stressed we would be about filling out forms. Forms?

I finally forced one door open and found another door beyond it. To my relief, it opened to the outdoors. Water flowed down the steps, and a flatboat passed and disappeared under the flow as it went downstream. Tiny voices from another boat, girls from high school, implored me to push them under and over as they were stuck. Without seeing them, I did, and felt guilty.

I wondered why I was here and had taken a year off. I would graduate with strangers, I thought, which I regretted.

In a hallway, I encountered a boy from college who was a year behind me, standing in front of a door. Although he talked to me, it was as though I were not there. He poured out his affection for some worthless girl who would never notice him, while expecting comfort from the invisible. I had little to give as I had none for myself.

I found myself in a room with a long table, where the scene looked like an elaborate 18th-century banquet. At a sideboard, I bent slightly to pour coffee and heard a gasp behind me. Without looking, I knew it was my mother, horrified by what she perceived as my lack of underclothes under my skirts.

I wasn’t wearing skirts.