June 1

I was in a room with no windows and no door.

The walls were made of something that breathed —

not the mechanical rhythm of a machine, but the slow, patient breathing of something that had been waiting a long time for me to arrive.

On the floor: a single sheet of paper. On it, a sentence I recognized but could not remember writing:

you are allowed to stay here even if you don’t know why

I sat down. The breathing slowed. The room exhaled.

For the first time in the dream, I was also exhaling.