I stand at a fragrant wall, carefully considering candle scents. Tobacco, Field of Clover, Tom Hanks in Castaway. One of the candles emits a sound instead of a scent. I lean in close to hear it, but the flame licks at my cheek. The candles are expensive and unevenly priced. Wicked Witch costs over two hundred dollars. Amber with Wooly Mammoth DNA is seventy-five. Half of the wall is occupied by a nauseating periwinkle candle labeled Grape Jelly. “It’s our top-seller,” the salesgirl smiles. I feel unsure of myself.

In fact, I feel profoundly unsure about everything. “I’m Leonardo DiCaprio’s personal candle shopper,” I confess. The salesgirl is awestruck at my station in life and shows it by massaging my arms.
 
I struggle to speak. It’s impossible to express the deep misery I feel to be spending my breaths in service to another human’s olfactory whims. “Kings, servants, and slaves,” I say, looking up. The salesgirl has aged into a doughy Midwestern woman who might be Steven Avery’s mother on Making a Murderer. “Ah,” she says, reaching high up on the shelf to retrieve a candle. She hands it to me. The label reads: Servant.
 
I wake up and the cat is on top of me, meowing for his morning treat.

I’m throwing a dinner party for either a large amount of people or a small gathering; it keeps changing. I’m dead set on serving what I think is an AMAZING idea for dessert, no matter how emphatically my husband tells me that he does not agree. It’s an ice cream cake created in the likeness of Marilyn Monroe’s baby. And I don’t make this thing; it’s on the market. I know just where to buy it, and suddenly I’m there, in the basement of this vacant, subtly Asian emporium where a single chest freezer stands chock full of Marilyn Monroe Baby Cakes. The box has a window on top so you can gaze onto the cake, sort of like Snow White’s coffin. I wrinkle my nose at the details: angelic face, heart-shaped buttons on the onesie (it’s dressed), and here is where I reconsider. Is this cake strange? Will my guests think it’s avant garde or unappetizing? Not everyone shares my sense of style. No, nonsense. It’s a sure thing. Trust your gut. So I go for it. I buy every last cake.
 
Then it’s the night of the party. The guests are in the dining room, bellies full, laughing with each other. I’m in the kitchen taking the cakes out of the freezer and suddenly I’m not so sure. I say to my husband, “I get it. People don’t want to eat baby.”
 
“It’s Marilyn Monroe's baby,” he points out, only trying to help.
 
I’m half-heartedly surveying the contents of our freezer, but it’s too late. I take my knife out and start cutting the cakes, trying to decide who gets what. They’ll like them, won’t they? It’ll all work out fine. Right?

​I’m talking to a friend on the phone about the family coming down to Southern California for a visit. She says, “We’re coming! I just bought the tickets. We’re taking Trailer.”

“Trailer?”
 
And then boom, I’m at the Trailer Corporate Headquarters and R&D facility inside a hangar, where a swarthy executive is giving me the tour. A 747 idles before us, and behind it the team is busy hitching it up. It is large and triangular, and its hatch is open like the upper jaw of a crocodile’s mouth. Inside, the passengers are laying down flat into form-fitting spaces, like an egg carton for people. They’re all wearing flying suits, but the executive assures me this is only for testing purposes. “Go ahead and imagine regular people wearing hoodies and jeans if it makes it easier for you,” he tells me. I look at him strange.
 
“No flight attendants, no drink service, no restrooms,” the executive explains. “It’s intrinsic to the design that passengers remain flat, but it’s also how we offer such competitively priced flights.” He shoots his finger at a man uselessly motioning with those lighted batons people wave on the runway. “Alright, Donger,” he shouts. Donger? “Let ‘er rip.”
 
The 747 revs its engines and lurches forward, dragging the trailer behind it. The hatch has been closed and I can see the faces of the passengers pressed beneath the glass, which is fogging up.
 
“You’re going to want to step back,” the executive says, smiling as the airplane guns it past us, reaching takeoff speed with a quickness only possible in dreams. We watch the plane lift and take with it a trailer full of two hundred discount flyers. As it climbs, I watch the trailer sway back and forth from its hitch.
 
“That was actually pretty smooth,” I say to the executive. I turn to him. “What’s the landing like?”
 
Suddenly he’s not the executive but a greasy mechanic wiping his hands. “The landing’s not so smooth,” he squints. “The trailer hits first.”

​I am submerged in a bean box. Black-eyed peas, I think. The sun has warmed the beans, making it all the more luxurious. I hear someone yelling, “Mommy!” in the distance, so I sink beneath the surface to hide from my children. Even in the dream I'm reminded of that Calgon commercial that I thought was so hilarious when I was young. Now I get it. Like, completely. Which is why I’m burrowing down beneath the peas as the squealing voices of my offspring approach. And there beneath the beans I find forgotten trinkets of my youth:

• Red Cash Box with a single digit security code on a dial of ten numbers.
• My first sticker book, which was really a photo album with a picture on the cover of a couple walking along a riverbank and the man is smoking.
• My old white leather Nikes with the red whoosh and a tribal amount of friendship pins clattering from my shoelaces.
• A pair of clamdiggers my mother sewed for my brother in a garish textile, making him the subject of endless ridicule at school day he wore them. 

I jump out of the bean box quickly. There could be anything in there.