The Fourth Factor

I find myself in a room that’s like my bedroom in my old house in K---, more or less. I notice a stranger is there—a dark-haired boy, maybe between eight and 10. I immediately go over and interrogate him—who is he, and what is he doing here in my house? But then I ‘remember’—he’s the neighbor’s kid, and we’ve arranged it so that he comes over here when he arrives home before his parents do so he doesn’t have to be in the house alone. Oops.

After that, I want to make sure he feels welcome here, so I invite him over to my desk to see what I’m working on. I’m reverse engineering a notebook, I explain. I have it there: the powder blue leather-covered notebook I bought yesterday. I’m going to take it apart, and then I’m going to use what I learned to make a notebook of my own that’s similar in design. As I speak, I’m actually disassembling it. He doesn’t say anything—not once in the entire dream, I think—but he seems to be listening.

And when I’m all done, I tell him, I’m going to put the original one back together. It won’t be exactly as it was before, since part of it was damaged in the process—something I easily could have avoided, but it doesn’t actually matter that much. I’m going to sew together some colorful scraps of leather to replace that part, and it’ll end up looking nicer that way anyway.

At one point, he takes an envelope that’s stuffed into my desk organizer—it’s made from a greyish recycled paper, like the kind used for official correspondence in Germany—and sets it on top of a pile of unopened envelopes. Probably trying to help, I figure. I take the envelope and put it back where it was. The pile is unopened mail, I explain. In between finals, visiting family, everyone getting the flu and all the work being done on the house, there’s a lot I haven’t had the chance to look at yet.