The Dreams He Had During Her Absence

#1: Everyone was acting like a storm had just passed. Looking out windows, pulling aside curtains tentatively. On the lawn, a froth of white, like foam on the beach. He went outside. The froth was white paint, from his house (in reality, yellow). The paint on the front of the house was missing, in big ugly sections. Shingles lay on the lawn.
Probable significance: The house is the self. The self is crumbling. She left and took her charms with her, and curses rushed in.

#2: He's on the bus, at the bottom of a mountainous hill. A paved Everest. The bus is very cold. He can see his breath, and his bare legs are stinging. The bus begins to climb, throwing everyone's heads back. He gets distracted and looks at something inside the bus and when he looks out the window again, the bus is back at the foot of the mountain. This happens again and again, until the phone wakes him up.
Probable significance: Commonplace actions taken for granted are fraught with complexity. His life has become futile and boring.

#3: He's in a tunnel with soft walls. The walls are papered with pages from a manuscript and they’re breathing. He stops to try and read the text, but he hears someone behind him, footsteps booming wetly. This goes on until he comes out of the tunnel without having read anything. He's in a field in winter.
Probable significance: He’s lost inside his own mind, where he can't read the signs.

#4: He sits in a waiting room. A number of people sit on black, padded benches. Everyone's staring at a wall-mounted loudspeaker, the kind in cartoons, big flared bells like trumpets. Every so often, a voice comes over the loudspeaker and announces the number of the airplane that just crashed. Only they're not numbers, they're names, like grand ships. The Sebastian has gone down outside Ames, Iowa. The Glorious has gone down outside Stillwell, Oklahoma.
Probable significance: He feels the world is dangerous and stuffed full with chaos. All he can do is wait for the chaos to find him.