Niles awoke from a strange dream to find that his snoring had once again driven his wife from their bed. On his way to the bathroom, he peered into the darkened living room and, as he expected, saw her form upon the sofa. Returning to bed, he retrieved what he could of the dream, fully expecting to ponder it with amusement while drifting off for another hour or two of sleep. Niles and Thora were younger in the dream, perhaps in their fifties. They were at an academic conference in a hotel and

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... d a room many stories up; but he, an early riser, had gone down to the lobby to work on his paper, and then, breakfast time having come, he had returned to their room and found her conversing in the corridor with a couple of other women. He opened his mouth to utter a cheery "Good morning," but was arrested mid-word by the collective gasp of all three of the women as they turned to look at him. He looked down at himself and saw that, over his suit, he had pulled a sleeveless party dress of f lamboyant orange silk. The skirt f lared with stiff petticoats, something like a ballerina's tutu. With a surge of anger, he stripped off the dress and threw it to the f loor with a vindictive strength. That was the point at which he had awakened, greatly relieved to know he had been merely dreaming. Unfortunately, his review of these details failed either to amuse him or to lull him into a pleasant early morning drowse. Instead, it forced unwelcome questions upon him. Did the donning of a dress in a dream signify that the identity of a woman lurked in his subconscious? Was he emotionally the female that, before his birth, his mother had hoped he would prove to be? He rallied almost instantaneously from these absurd, nonsensical questions, the answer to which was an abrupt No! He had been born a male, had always felt himself to be a male, had always wanted to be a