Last night I had one of those dreams where there is a whole other world adjacent to ours and connected by a doorway that doesn’t exist when I am awake.

In the first such dream, I was in a public building, something like the Gardner Museum with a central courtyard. Off the courtyard, on the second floor, was an exhibit room that had on one side a hip roof. On the straight lower wall under the sloping roof was a small door, as into an attic crawl space. I opened the door to find a homey, bright, comfortable apartment. I remember open windows with sheer curtains blowing in the late spring breeze. My father lived there.

My father, who has been dead now for twenty years.

A few years later, I dreamed myself into a department store in Montreal. In the housewares department, along an interior wall, was a door that blended so perfectly into the wall that no one would notice it was there. You had to feel its edges with your fingers. You had to know where to touch to find the catch. The manager showed me and Dan in. Behind the door was a sophisticated urban apartment, loft-style, with exposed brick walls and a high-tech open kitchen. It was my father’s, but he wasn’t there at the moment. Some day it would be mine.

My dead father.

And now this. Off the entry hallway of our friends’ house, to the left, where, in waking life there is a window that looks out, in the dream is a doorway. In waking life, beyond the window is the outside yard. In the dream is a room that had been the master bedroom, but our friends had remodeled the house and were eager to show us that they had built an entirely new guest suite there. What had been the old bedroom was a living room; the old bathroom was still there, but they had added on a new guest master bedroom and bath. All the rooms were new and clean and bright and inviting.

Dan and I would be staying there.