This is a story about a dream. It's a fresh one, dredged from the shores of sleep, one untarnished by the lack of its telling. I have tried my best to recount what I can; what I cannot, I shall embellish. Here - a telling, as much for me as it is for you.

Tonight you dream of home. A dusty road, beside the tracks that they have lined with shards of old, gray, granite, the kind that crunches beneath your feet in the way one imagines mountains might. You stumble on the train track gravel, finding purchase on solid soil. Down this slope, away from the road, lies your home away from home. The home of your father's father - the home of your youth.

Time has not been kind to the memory. On the left are the shophouses, fronts gray and bare, shuttered, empty as cicada shells. A passing glimpse from your eye peels away layers of paint, reveals blank walls within. To the left, the first of the terrace houses, unformed, pale. Those are not your concern. Feet are now on asphalt. The sensation of bareness, neutral urban heat - the sun a non-presence, only its warmth. Only when you think about the light do you realise that you are still to young to have worn your glasses yet.

You stand on a piece of raised ground. To the north is where you came from. To the south, mysterious gardens. Behind you is eastwards, the edge of reason. Westwards lies the old house. Around you on all sides, the ground of the dream slopes away. Nascent surreality - sunlight, the colour of white-washed clarity, as in a Greek seaside town, fading in the corners of your vision, blanching the edge of the dream.

At the home of your father's father, the gate has no locks. You take it all in, and you approach. The weight of the gate as you reach through the bars and undo the latch grounds the dream, gives it form, and indeed the sensation of old steel beneath small hands is the first you will remember when you are awake. Within, the driveway, the garden - all is as remembered. All is as it was.

Dream-grass, the kind that is smooth to the touch of bare skin, grows on the lawn. The flowers are purple, resembling eyes. Steps, gentle. Tiled floor, moist soil. Hands grasp a leaf, confirming that everything that happens to you is a real thing, even here.

The coolness of the porch. Cold metal on skin.

Death has not scoured your memory of your father's father, though his bones are interred in a clean white jar.

You press down on the handle, and enter. The familiar presence within awaits.