To exorcise your anxieties, you invent a woman, draw her portrait, and then dream about her. You’re supposed to ask her questions, in your dream, and, after you wake, write her responses in your “dream journal.”

But when I present her portrait to K, he becomes enraged. “This is your woman? This is your animus?” He balls her up in his left hand and drops her to the floor. “Try again.”

I again draw the woman, the locus of my anxieties and erotic fantasies. She is my life’s work, the climax of my existence. I don’t ask K for his approval before I begin dreaming about her.

K is jealous of my animus, I feel. He wants to dream about her, ask her questions, and write about her in his own “dream journal.”

I dream of K instead of my animus. I ask him where she is. He says that she has left me because I’m “too unstable.” I tell him that’s why I drew an animus, to stabilize. He says that it’s too late and that she’d rather be with a rich guy besides. I can’t disagree.

I wake up but don’t bother to write any of that down.