As I get older, I recall fewer and fewer dreams. I have no doubt, however, that I still dream, because the brain needs to dream, right? My secret dreams, the ones so secret even I don’t know about them, concern me, and more so lately. Here’s why.

Over the bed I sleep in hangs a collage of newspaper pages.

I measured and taped it up there a few weeks ago as a mock window. A builder recommended this strategy to me, as a way of us making window size choices more concrete before he orders and installs them.

I glance at the elongated rectangle a few times every day, when I’m pulling on or off my clothes or arranging the sheets and pillows. My attention occasionally rests on this headline or that.

Gaza. The Democrats, Clinton and Obama, at a party. Paid death notices. Suicide bombers. Much of this I absorb without meaning to. And how does what I take in infiltrate or inspire my dreams, even ones I never “see”?

Every day, too, I glance at the advertisements saturating my newspaper window. I notice that luxury goods and travel appear on the pages with the direst world and national news. This is something I’ve noticed before in my regular newspaper reading, and it has always bothered me.

How do these juxtapositions (of troubled Gaza with soothing Tucson, for example) affect my dreams, seen or unseen? More so, how do unseen dreams affect my wakeful self?

I’ve been wondering about this.

(And I am also wondering why these photographs are so bluish. I made a mistake, but what, I don’t know.)