Toys are falling slowly around me. An ecstatic moment. Beautiful toys, red, blue, yellow, green; they look old fashioned, but I recognize them all. A Fisher Price phone with a smiling face, a xylophone with each note a different color, a miniature work bench with a hammer for pounding stakes first from one side, then the other. A slinky, a plastic and metal drum, a three-tiered metal top with a red hand crank. I watch them falling, moving slowly downward.

I realize that the same top is falling in the same position and at the same angle as it was just a few minutes ago. I see that all the toys are repeating, it’s a cycle of the same toys over and over again. As I watch, the top comes round again, the drum, the phone…

Yet none of them are building up around me. There should be piles of toys all around me but there aren’t. They recycle themselves.

As I look closer, I can see that the toys are actually just pictures of toys on a large loop of paper, like wallpaper, that repeats over and over again. Somewhere there is a little motor or handle, slowly turning the entire contraption, but I cannot see it. When I realize there are edges, and that the picture loops around again, I relax, and begin to watch the pattern. The methodical falling of toys never changes, their angles and positions to each other never shift, and they never accumulate around me.

Dream collected in Gloucester, MA, 2011.