Someone was screaming, a long, steady holler, so loud it woke me up.

It was dark. There were streetlights, pavement, the rumble of distant
cars. I was standing in the middle of Oxford Street, half a block from
my dorm room. My feet were bare, and I was wearing a tank top and
flannel pajama bottoms. It felt like people were gawking at me, but it
was two in the morning and the street was empty.

Somehow I got back into my building, then I sat on my bed and tried
to reconstruct what had happened. I remembered going to sleep. I
remembered the dream. What I did not remember was flying from my
bed and sprinting down the hall and into the street, shouting, but that
is what I had done.

The dream had been of home. Dad had built a maze on Buck’s Peak
and trapped me inside it. The walls were ten feet high and made of
supplies from his root cellar—sacks of grain, cases of ammunition,
drums of honey. I was searching for something, something precious I
could never replace. I had to escape the maze to recover it, but I
couldn’t find the way out, and Dad was pursuing me, sealing the exits
with sacks of grain stacked into barricades.

—

I STOPPED GOING TO my French group, then to my sketching class.
Instead of reading in the library or attending lectures, I watched TV in
my room, working my way through every popular series from the past
two decades. When one episode ended, I would begin the next without
thinking, the way one breath follows another. I watched TV eighteen or
twenty hours a day. When I slept I dreamed of home, and at least once
a week I awoke standing in the street in the middle of the night,
wondering if it was my own cry that I’d heard just before waking.