Dreams Of Failing, Etc.

Why don't you begin by telling me about the dreams you said have been troubling you?

I'm locked out of my house and can't find the keys. I am walking around in an unfamiliar city and everyone I encounter is speaking a language I can't understand. I look in the mirror and I don't recognize the face that is looking back at me. I'm moving through a huge crowd with my family and friends and when I turn around they've all disappeared. I've lost my way in a dark forest. I'm being swept away in an avalanche. I'm falling from a great height. I'm in a little flooded boat that is rapidly being carried far out to sea. I am drowning. I'm being suffocated, strangled, smothered, buried alive. I am trapped in a burning building, aboard a sinking ship, in a car that is spinning out of control. I open my eyes and can no longer see. I open my mouth to speak and nothing comes out. I put pen after pen to paper and discover that words have utterly forsaken me; I am no longer capable of making sense. I place the needle down on record after record and hear only silence. I wake up one morning naked in an unfamiliar room and there is a pile of blood-stained clothes next to the bed. An inquisitor I can't see makes impossible demands of me, and my failure to satisfy these demands will result in my banishment from the kingdom that is my life. Returning from work one day I discover that my address no longer exists; the house I live in and everything in it has disappeared. I drive around and around for days at a time and never find my way back home.

This is a rather exhaustive --and exhausting-- inventory. Anything else you'd like to add?

(Hesitates briefly) Again and again and again my father is throwing a can of corn across the kitchen at my crying and cowering mother....