dubious attics & barge-driving lessons & groundhog hillside & artificial sight

lisa and merritt have moved into another big old house with a mansion-sized fireplace and rooms without 90 degree angles-- instead the sides of rooms angle gently inward, forming outside alcove courtyards. lisa is selling shares in some enormous roll of carpeting that they've gotten ahold of, and I buy in and then immediately regret it because I know I can't afford it. I keep wanting to see the attic and then being told all over again that it's not a good idea and going, oh, yeah. right. I forget now what's wrong with it, but something ominous.

there are barge-driving lessons on the river, and I'm taking part. there is some discussion of a canoe-type boat and whether or not it's what people are calling a tanker.

I'm walking across a hillside, my arms swinging at my sides, when the knuckles of my right hand brush over one of the many holes in the ground-- and something clamps on-- not painfully, just alarming me. I look down, and in my hand is a prairie dog (though the word in my head in the dream is "groundhog"). I shake it off, and, there, still in my hand, is it's baby. it's miniature and adorable, and I think about hanging on to it as a pet, but then think better of it and place it gently at the mouth of the burrow it's parent has disappeared down. I continue across the hillside, realizing the ground is full of burrows and small creatures, vulnerable at my feet.

someone points out a man in the room and tells me he has artificial sight-- he was blind in one eye, and another of the tenants devised the solution-- there's a chip implanted, not in the damaged eye, but rather in the tip of his nose-- it's mapped to a vast universe of coordinates the designer has spent the last twenty years plotting. he shows me examples of the patterns penciled on the wall of the room, travelling all over it, describing it entirely.