The more I see, the less there is of this phantom body. There is no head at all. The arms disappear, trailing away like dark tenticles. The legs, too, seem to disappear around the knees. Whatever it was, it is dead, and it is rotting.

In a low voice, I hear it speak to me, mocking me. I haven't asked it a question, but it knows what my question would have been.

"I am not man. I am not woman. I am not she-male."

I am as afraid as a dreamer can be, feeling suffocated, unable to make sense of where I am, and now, who I am. Why am I with this thing? Or is it me?

I look down, and I see that I am just like the corpse on the bed. I am neither man, nor woman, nor anything in between. I am a torso, blunted at the extremities, somehow rotten in front, my body just a welter of fleshy bruises that are flattened and patchy. Did I once have breasts? Is that reddish bump between my legs something male?

I can't remember the exact words, but I think somebody was saying to me: "You thought you were so smart.You can be male when you want. You can be female when you want. You can be both when you want."

Those words, or words like them, are almost paralyzing to hear. I can't seem to swallow, I can't seem to catch my breath. There is some obstruction deep in my throat, and my nostrils seem to be covered over in flesh. I wonder if I have a head at all; the thing in the bed with me did not.

I don't want to see this lump of flesh in the bed, this bed that now seems to be more like a morgue slab. Why have I snuck down to a morgue, to lie with this torso?

Now I am in a graveyard, and I watch two hands. One holds a hammer and the other, a chisel. They try to carve onto a stone. But all they can do is make scrabbles and scratches. I don't know if I thought about this in the dream, but now I think it: were the hands unable to make sense of me for a tombstone? Unable to say male, or female? She-male isn't even right, because sometimes I am so male it would be impossible to imagine me every in lingerie, and and sometimes I am so female, it seems impossible that I would have male anatomy.

I am so afraid, I fear that I will die of fright. I am back in the morgue. There is no way for me to move off the slab, not with the atrophy of the flesh and the missing limbs. I want to cry, if only to feel, by the tears, that I still have some kind of face. Now I seem to be sinking in quicksand. I think if I remain quiet, if I just can stay even, this torso that I have become won't sink. Could there be an advantage to having no arms or legs to thrash about and bring me to this suffocating death?

My parents stand above me, looking down sadly.

"The moment of conception," my father says to my mother, "I was thinking of being you."

"The moment of conception," she answers, "I was thinking of being you."

So this is the answer then, to my transgendered soul.

People are in a graveyard, and instead of flowers, they are throwing clothing into a grave, women's clothing, men's clothing, women's clothing, men's clothing.

Then they put some kind of shroud over the grave, some kind of sheet. Here is something that is not male or female.

I dreamed that I was dead. Perhaps if I had dreamed, instead, that I was dying, I would have actually died? They say it's so. I am afraid someday this will happen.

I am very frightened of my dream this morning, and I am afraid that there is no understanding myself or anything. And that the only thing that happens when you stop dreaming, no matter how bad or how good, is eternal sleep.