I’m attending a conference in a great hall. As the vast audience assembles, pages of a document or manuscript are being distributed to us. Each page seems to be a statement about a different conference participant. A prominent scientist is in the gathering and when his statement reaches me, I notice that a second sheet is attached to it, stuck to it the way photographs sometimes stick together. On Professor X’s added page is a photograph of himself as a child. I show this to my wife and we smile at each other, since the Professor is well known to us. “Only Professor X would do this,” I say, ” — and can get away with it!” The picture was apparently intended to be drolly amusing, in keeping with Professor X’s sense of humor.

Generally, I am feeling quite excited by all the doings at this momentous event, and also a bit apprehensive. Will I be equal to the great significance of the occasion, or is it just too big for me? There’s a background sense of being overwhelmed by the whole affair.

At one point, there is a fellow in his ’30s or ’40s singing quite animatedly to the large group. In the course of his intense performance, a stream of clear water begins to spout from the middle of his forehead just above the place between his eyes. There is the feeling that something dreadful is happening to him, something that both threatens his health and is embarrassing, as if he were bizarrely incontinent in an alarming way. The liquid is coming from the area of the “third eye.”

Some people go to help him. A woman — who had apparently felt insecure about receiving all the papers that were distributed — takes my page 8 and uses it to mop up the water that had spewed from the singer. (Page 8 is peculiarly thick, as if it weren’t just a page but a thin metallic box with dark newsprint and the smudgy picture of someone on it.) She apologizes to me and I, for my part, do not protest, since that would be ungenerous of me under the circumstances. Yet I wonder why I am the one who is being put at this disadvantage. I am troubled about losing that page, but also am concerned about how I appear to the others.

[See also related dialogue]