Set me adrift and I'm lost over there

I dreamed that I was visiting an alternate present.

It was not quite a tour, but all the other travelers were strangers to me; the building in which we had assembled reminded me of a cross between a bus terminal and an elementary school, or something that was simultaneously brisk and institutional and paneled inside with mellow-varnished wood, awning windows, those chain-link glass doors. It was too hot even with all the windows cranked open to the winter outside, the kind of raw soaking chill that usually gets in through any crack, and I kept shedding layers as we waited until I was down to my shoved-up shirtsleeves, everything else bundled over my arm. The bus, when it came, looked very much like a nineteenth-century train carriage, or perhaps that's what it was. It had green trim, seats too narrowly spaced down the aisle. Before we boarded, the man who was not quite our guide warned us one last time that, even though all applicants were carefully screened ahead of time for mental and physical compatibility with the process of travel and the other present, not everyone made the transition successfully. Some fourth-dimensional rotation was involved: "unsuccessfully," in this case, therefore seemed to mean that your eyes could wind up coming out your feet. We had all signed the necessary papers. Some nausea and disorientation at the moment of transition was normal. I remember no movement, but I remember landscape passing outside the windows, forested and sunny and much too green for the time of year, otherwise unremarkable. I don't think I was sick. Coming out of the terminal in the other world, barrel-vaulted skylights overhead and polished granite underfoot, I had to change some money at the nearest kiosk, which was also a café run by a young woman dressed like any coffeeshop employee. The menu on the chalkboard was written in English, but the letters were shaped differently. I couldn't tell how far back the divergence went. With a ten-dollar bill, I bought something that was not quite ice cream, although it was cold and tasted milky, with hot shreds of something that was not quite coconut on top, although it had almost the same buttery sweetness. The change I got back was in the local currency, whatever country I was in, I don't remember and I'm not even sure if I knew its name: five or six bills like short strips of stiff ribbon, gold, dark green, magenta; I knew that each color signified a different denomination, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out which. They creased easily and folded up like origami, but couldn't be torn. While I was standing there at the kiosk, attempting to determine how much pocket money this meant I actually had (and eat my not quite ice cream before it melted out of its cup, which was made of waxed cardboard and not even remotely alien), a man came up who was a judicial or political authority of some sort; I could tell from his clothes, which were royal purple and charcoal grey and cut like a suit that really wanted to be a cap and gown. Before he ordered anything, he asked the young woman, "When is it appropriate to feel very strange?" She replied, "In the middle of great changes." And he nodded, as though she had given him the right answer to a challenge or a riddle, and he paid for his not quite ice cream, and I woke up.

Diana Wynne Jones is so going to sue my subconscious. I'm going back to bed.

When your sights are on infinity, you don't fire blanks

This is a catalogue of talismans: the shrines we build without thinking about them. I didn't sleep much last night, so I started thinking about mine.

These are the things that would travel with me wherever I went. The three-hundred-year-old onion bottle. A netted fishing float, newer and much the same salt-green. A butter-colored fragment of Baltic amber. An eleke of seven colors. The sundial ring and the moonstone pendant I wear daily. The obsolete fifty-franc note in my wallet. A newsboy's brown corduroy cap from the 1960's. The blue-eyed, gold-satin fire lizard I sewed and stuffed in ninth grade. A metal silhouette of Kokopelli from New Mexico. A green-and-gold glass dragon with a melting ice cream cone. A two-thousand-year-old chunk of concrete and white tesserae. The eleventh card from a tarot of goddesses, Oya, the whirlwind, Strength. The mezuzah that was made for me when I was twelve years old. A pair of earrings, cat-headed mermaids. The necklace by Elise Matthiesen, "Remember What You Say in Dreams." A framed print of John William Waterhouse's A Mermaid. Another of Michael Parkes' The Creation. A photograph of the Sibyl's Cave at Cumae, taken by a friend of mine in college. One of a pair of candlesticks, dark blue and dark green. Whenever I moved, I would know which boxes they were in. I would pack them carefully and unpack them first.

And so many of my talismans are books—plays, verse, novels, scholarship—but for now I am leaving them out, because even a short list would run on to lunacy. The same with music and lately with DVDs, as though you can hold on to stories like coins or shells. One year in high school, I carried the same book everywhere with me, in my backpack to and from classes, in my hand when I went out with friends, a little red-spined Modern Library edition with black-edged pages and I still know which shelf it's on.

What do you hold on to?