Relentless

difficulty falling asleep that Tuesday night.
    I endured one of my lost-and-alone dreams. Sometimes it is set in a deserted department store, sometimes in a vacant amusement park or in a train terminal where no trains depart and none arrive.
    This time, I roamed a vast and dimly lighted library, where the shelves soared high overhead. The intersecting aisles were not perpendicular to one another, but serpentine, as if reflecting the manner in which one area of knowledge can lead circuitously and unexpectedly to a seemingly unrelated field of inquiry.
    This library of the slumbering mind was buried in a silence as solid and as sinuous as the drifted sands of Egypt. No step I took produced a sound.
    The wandering passageways were catacombs without the mummified remains, harboring instead lives and the work of lifetimes set down on paper, bound with glue and signature thread.
    As always in a lost-and-alone dream, I remained anxious but not afraid. I proceeded in expectation of a momentous discovery, a thing of wonder and delight, although the possibility of terror remained.
    When the dream is in a labyrinthine train station, the silence is sometimes broken by footsteps that lure me before they fade. In a department store, I hear a faraway feminine laugh that draws me from kitchenware through bed-and-bath and down a frozen escalator.
    In this library, the thrall of silence allowed a single crisp sound now and then, as if someone in an adjacent aisle was paging through a book. Searching, I found neither a patron nor a librarian.
    An urgency gripped me. I walked faster, ran, turned a corner into what might have been a reading alcove. Instead of armchairs, the space offered a bed, and in it slept Penny, alone. The covers on my side of the bed were undisturbed, as though I had never rested there.
    Alarmed at the sight of her alone, I sensed in her solitude an omen of some event that I dared not contemplate.
    I approached the bed—and woke in it, beside her, where I had not been lying in the dream. Gone were the nautilus spirals of books, replaced by darkness and the pale geometry of curtained windows.
    Penny’s soft rhythmic breathing was a mooring to which I could tether myself in the gloom; her respiration should have settled me but did not. I continued to feel adrift, and anxious.
    Wanting something, not knowing what I wanted, I eased out of bed and, barefoot in pajamas, left the master suite.
    Moonlight through skylights frosted the longer run of the L-shaped upstairs hallway. Passing a thus twice-silvered mirror, I glanced at my reflection, which appeared as diaphanous as a ghost.
    I was awake but felt still dreambound. This venue, though it was my own house, seemed more sinister than the deserted library or than the department store haunted by an elusive laughing spirit.
    My rising anxiety focused on Milo. I hurried the length of the main hall and turned right into the darker short arm.
    From the gap between the threshold and the bottom of Milo’s bedroom door, a fan of radiance continuously fluttered between a sapphire-blue intensity and an icy gunmetal blue, not the light of fire or television but suggesting mortal danger nonetheless.
    We have a policy of knocking, but I opened the door without announcing myself—and was relieved to find Milo safe and asleep.
    The dimmer switch on the bedside lamp had been dialed down to an approximation of candlelight. He lay supine, head raised on a pillow. Behind his closed eyelids, rapid eye movement signified dream sleep.
    With him lay Lassie, her chin resting on his abdomen. She was as awake as any guardian charged with a sacred task. She rolled her eyes to watch me without moving her head.
    On the U-shaped desk, intermingling clouds of color—each a shade of blue—billowed in slow motion across the computer monitor, like a kaleidoscope with amorphous forms instead of geometric shapes.
    I had never seen such a screen saver. Because Milo’s computer had no Internet access, this couldn’t have been downloaded from the Web.
    The Internet is more a force for evil than for good. It offers the worst of humankind absolute license and anonymity—and numerous addictive pursuits over which to become obsessive. Kids are having innocence and willpower—if not free will itself—stolen from them.
    When Milo wanted to go online, he had to use my computer or Penny’s. We have installed serious site-blocking software.
    The wing of the desk to the left of the computer was covered