I am within a new sleeping realm now, and so is everyone else. Left undetermined is how I know this about others. If you sleep on your left side, you dream of the future. On your right, it's the past that will be your topic. And on your back, the present is the subject.

This is universal, everyone. Most everyone sleeps on their right side. When they cramp, they spend very little time on their backs, then it's back over on their right. There are many studies which demonstrate this fact, yet none which explain it.

That is the dreamstate of my dream. This is the wake state.

I am in a classroom. I am a teacher. I understand this, although I have no idea how it came to be. I have neither the training nor experience for the job. I have a sheet from "the office" in the morning, and I detail a response on it and send it back, just like every morning. There are always two names on the sheet.

Here are some children. I love children. This I can do. I warm to them, smiling, squatting down. A parent is watching me, undecided. I have a colleague also, behind me. I must please her as well. Someone I see in a suit in the periphery. Maybe he's the principal. I don't know.

My colleague asks, politely, why I send the same report to the office each morning. I don't know what she means. Finally, I do.

If you train a monkey to perform a duty, he will do it repetitively but he won't evaluate conditions and factors. In the famous example from Hayakawa the van speaker destroyer, a monkey can drive through an intersection on green and stop on red. He will understand to do that. However, he will not be able to adjust his pattern if a truck is stalled in the middle of the intersection. He will plow on through on green.

I had learned to return the report to the office. The report was appropriate, once. It related to two stoonts and missing homework. However, it did not apply always to the same two and every night's homework.

I am caught out by monkeyshines.

The family, as loosely construed, is presenting a stage play. We are sitting around an indoor setting. The furniture is scant and obscure.

The "family" is Niki J's, actually, although no one recognizeable is presented here. They are all stand-ins.

Minerva is my center of attention. I am across the table from her in a small room. We are just sitting. There is an audience, of about the number of the actors. This Minerva is not my sister-in-law, but an unaccomplished actress playing her without any of her characteristics, which involve the comic theatrical sensuality of the ineluctably aging and much pretense. In the play, she just sits, as do we all.

We break. Stand up and move off the stage, out of the room. I know we are supposed to be back there for the next scene.

I am stepping through a high loft, almost like the upper level of a bank of prison cells, but there are no bars. These are bedrooms, only they are indistinguishable due to lots of fabric; curtains, bedspreads, clothing, all about, in no particular order.

One who happens to be walking the same pace and direction offers a correction to a bed. It is made of willow reeds bound and woven. He says, like this, and he straightens the head of the bed, which was bent upwards originally. I did not agree. I did not think he should be adjusting someone's bed.

(He is the type of someone I remember from the Army, sort of slack and flip. Used to lie at night in his bunk and talk dreamily with his buddy Roudebush, who was certifiable, in the upper. "I guess I loved her," this one once says.)

I am driving now, and too fast. I am returning to the stage. It is possible that all the actors have not returned. No, I'm sure they have not. I think we are remiss. The audience will expect someone to be sitting around our stage set when the curtain goes up.

I drive fast, and I see a building approach, like a movie run at a faster speed. I pull up, without noise or screech, just short of the door.

I take my place around the small room of the set, but I notice, something has happened to Minerva. Her blouse has been replaced by bandaging. She has been in an accident, I'm told. She must be in pain, although she does not show it, and no one offers any sort of commisseration. There is no alarm.

She lies face down in her place. This will be her new part. It's just another bit of the performance, hampered by her offstage accident, like a soap opera actress who becomes pregnant during the season.