At the beach, you leave your wife and enter the men’s change room, though almost immediately the room begins to lose its proportions. The ceiling is low, the light dim and yellowed, and what should be a place of simple transition has become a narrow passage, turning sharply left into a small antechamber and then, inexplicably, into another room.
Men are changing in the half-light, bodies of different shapes and sizes gathered too closely together, shirts lifted, towels loosened, skin briefly exposed before being covered again. You move between them sideways, trying not to touch, though there is hardly enough space for this kind of politeness.
You are carrying your things and looking for somewhere to put them. There should be a bench. There should be somewhere to rest the clothes you have taken from the outside world while you become, briefly, someone else. But there is nothing, and the further you go the less certain you are that this is a room you can actually leave.
So you turn back.
Among the men, as you squeeze towards the entrance, a dark-skinned, heavyset man leans close and whispers that you are so attractive.
The sentence is strangely soft.
For a moment you cannot tell what has changed: the room, the man, or yourself. You only know that the walls seem closer now, that you want the open air, the beach, the distance from these bodies and from the intimacy of having been noticed.
Perhaps this is what remains when you wake: not the compliment, exactly, but the sensation of it at your ear, the small disturbance of being seen when you were trying to pass unnoticed.
And somewhere behind you the change room continues, its corridor turning left into darkness, the rooms opening one into another without quite arriving anywhere.
You wake before you change.
Notitia – attending to the inner world of the psyche and dreams.
Notitia Health 
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