She waited, still watching me, then shrugged and turned back to the window. She is a big-shouldered, handsome woman. Through her thick dark hair a broad plume of silver flows up from the left temple, a startling silver flame. She is as tall as I am, even though it seems to me I can remember a time when I had a good hand's span on her. Perhaps I have shrunk, it would not surprise me.
Misery is a certain shriveller.
In the dream. If only I could communicate to her the quick, keen sense of being here, the dense all-roundness of the dream, and everything in it so piercingly familiar, and I being I and also not. Frowning, I nodded, dull as a dog. I shrugged, sloping a shoulder. Yes, the front door here.