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of their doom.
    Falling and falling, showered by the debris of the broken airplanes, they rained down through the sky in a manner that was almost regimented, row after row of them, their lips shut, their hands resting on the arms of their seats, their posture suggestive of passengers preparing themselves for the in-flight movie.
    I snapped out of the dream. I sat upright, pushed the bedsheet aside. Sondra was asleep. I padded out of the bedroom to the kitchen and took a bottle of mineral water from the refrigerator and guzzled it without closing the door. I liked the feel of cold air. The night was clammy.
    I went into my office, pulled the tiny chain that turned on the desk lamp, and sat down. I put on my glasses. On a yellow legal pad, I outlined the dream before the details faded. I’d been exploring the syntax of dreams for years, searching the mysteries for meaning. I encouraged my patients to record their dreams.
    Airplanes. They’d been awaiting clearance to land and disgorge their passengers. Arrivals. The baby, the new arrival. Clearly I still hadn’t assimilated the fact of Sondra’s pregnancy. It would play on my mind for a long time. I expected to have all manner of dreams in the coming months that could be traced to the unborn child.
    But the collision of the two craft? The expressionless faces of the passengers falling out of the sky? What was that supposed to suggest to me? Obstacles to the healthy arrival of the child, say? The whole gamut of unspeakable worries that ran from webbed feet to cleft palate to Down’s Syndrome to stillborn.
    Or was it an echo of the violent encounter I’d had in the parking-lot? I rubbed the side of my neck, which ached.
    I walked through the house. In the living-room I absently flicked the On button of the TV remote, and I thought of those dream people dropping, with no apparent fear, to their deaths. Not every dream yielded an interpretation. Some were obscure, wilfully so, the mind playing cryptic games. A joker loose in the head, a mischievous projectionist run amuck in the movie theater.
    I opened a window because the room was stuffy. The hum of traffic never stopped. Brakes screeched somewhere, the next street, the next block. I saw a pale-blue WelCor car drive slowly past, wet and shining under a streetlamp like a pale shark. WelCor, a private security firm, patrolled the neighborhood every hour or so.
    I sat down in front of the TV. The dream was already fading, even if the feeling of being unsettled still clung to me. I looked at CNN. A river had burst its banks in Louisiana; flooded streets, people paddling canoes through the floating debris of ruined households, sunken porches. Then the image changed and we were back in the studio, and the newscaster, a blond woman with unblinking eyes, was talking about something else: national events crammed into less than twenty-five minutes, everything was zap zap zap. Moving right along …
    A familiar face appeared on the box. Intrigued, I leaned forward, elbows propped on my knees.
    The newscaster said, ‘Rumors continue to grow in Washington that the President plans to nominate Emily Ford for the position of US Attorney-General. Ms Ford, former Los Angeles County DA, and presently Chief Consultant to the West Coast Division of the Presidential Task Force On Crime, is making no comment at this time. Stories about her possible nomination have been frequent in recent weeks. Ms Ford, who has become prominent for her hard line on crime, may not prove to be a popular choice with certain elements inside the Democratic Party.’
    Now the screen was filled with recorded images. Emily Ford was pictured in bright sunshine outside a courthouse, smiling thinly and brushing aside the questions of the predators who kept shoving microphones into her face. She uttered the usual cant about how she’d make a statement at the appropriate time, and then she vanished inside a waiting car.
    I heard a sound from