Night before last, I had nightmares so bad I had to wake myself from them by screaming. I tried twice and made no sound: sleep paralysis. The third time I think I was awake enough to be shouting into a darkened room for real, but derspatchel and I were on different sleep schedules and he didn't hear me. Brick-walled alleys and twisting drainpipes. In a warehouse, a room with a safe, a room full of file cabinets, a room with a bare wooden desk, a few pencils and a swing-arm lamp, all empty and cavernous with electric light. A portfolio of charcoal sketches and a series of illustrated adventures in a style that looked like Chris Van Allsburg, but the name on them was Millar. A rapist of children and a killer of women: nothing about him looked wrong except that he never listened. He didn't even have to make the effort not to. No one that I valued was human to him.

Last night's dreams were reassuringly novelistic and therefore useless to me at the present time: the annual get-together of an association something like the Camp Fire Girls, the permeable boundaries between here and elsewhere, and a cross-generational story that only occurred to me as I was waking as a variant on Tam Lin. A father has lost his daughter in the otherworld; she was forfeit for some decision he made decades ago, when he was a film producer with a coke habit and a trick of seeing into places he shouldn't, although he mostly chalked it up to the drugs at the time. He's been looking for her since, along with the demon lover she disappeared with, with a few ideas of how and where and a fragmentary knowledge of what he'll have to endure if he wants to free her—not knowing, as always, if even free she'll want to return. I wasn't sure he was so human himself; he should have been older than he looked, if his career started in the '70's. He was played more or less by Denholm Elliott, though, who did look younger than he was for years. He wore a very crumpled suit and more than one tie. He said it was a talisman. I couldn't tell if he was right; it wouldn't have been visible to me if it was.

My body is not treating me well at all. We had dinner tonight at Taipei Tokyo. Sushi is a form of self-care. I still haven't had onigiri, but with all the recent talk about foxes, inarizushi really seemed like a good idea. I scored a windfall DVD of From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) at Goodwill while unsuccessfully looking for a new corduroy jacket. I may watch it to cheer up with.