Lately, my dreams have been more deadthan usual. They have always been a little dead,but only around the edges. Or the deadnesshas been a dimple on the dreamscape:a little sweet, a little fermented, a little vegetal.Appalachian yellow asphodel, the dream says,and its sunny stars shine, exuberant and deadand loudly so. The bluebuck lowers its blue faceinto them. The cryptic treehunter carriesa dwarf mantis orangely into a tree. Becausethe dream is so dead, there is no differencebetween the land and the sea. The eelgrass limpetcould easily be mistaken for a mountain pebble,the forkshell for a shelf fungus. Because the dreamis so dead, there is no difference between mossand my breath. The golden toad clambers acrossthe cloud forest of my face. I have followedthe speckled trail of Himalayan quail feathersand now I am on a beach that is also a mountainthat is also, somehow, the scrubby backyardof my childhood home. The IndefatigableGalápagos mouse is here, which seems unlikelyas anything. I hadn’t thought to see the Japanese sea lionagain, or for the first time. I’ve heard that most people diewithin one day of having a dream like this, in whichI am packing my suitcase full of Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō mating calls.In the forested canyons of being dead, they canfinally be answered. Most people die within a dayof waking from this dream, but if life on Earthwere a day, we have only been awake for one minuteand fifteen seconds of it. Long enough to erasethe large sloth lemur and the Mariana mallardand eighty-three percent of everything else.On balance, it’s unnatural to be living. A statisticalimpossibility. Extinct means extinguish means quench,but what mouth is so thirsty for our deadness?What could hold the Navassa curly-tailed lizardas it curls its tail in alarm? What could holdten million species? The Old English bulldog,for example, or the aquarium full of phantom shinersgleaming like the northern lights. It is alreadyflamboyantly night. The space between the starsis startlesome as the eyes of the Queen of Sheba’s gazelle.I recognize the Rodrigues night heron by its unwaryamble. I too had thought myself unassailable,buoyant with time. O night soft as sea mink,everything’s going to be fine. O Tasmanian tiger,not even one hundred years gone. What kind of spongeis this dream, that it can soak up so much time?What happens when it’s squeezed? My knees have becomeupland for the upland moa. My hips are mottledby the Vegas Valley leopard frog. I don’t knowhow an entire forest has sprouted inside my lungs,but I have been cooperative, and the leavesof the woolly-stalked begonia have been so gentle.My cells rumble beneath the plod of the Xenoceratops,which honestly seems too big to have vanished.My heart is itchy. I would like to place it in a cooler body.I would like to place it in a den of Yunnan lake newtsand let their red spines outshine my blood,though everything is already shining from the edgesin and closing the doors behind it. There has beensome confusion. I meant for the dream to end,but not while I was inside it. I have mistakenthe dream’s deadness for my own skin, my breathingfor the shaky song of the Zulu ambush katydid.