I was asleep, but I was waiting with great keenness for the doorbell to ring and awaken me. My waiting had preceded the onset of sleep; in fact I had actually fallen asleep through weariness, having already waited too long for that sound. I knew, though that nothing had really changed. When the doorbell rang, one dream or another would cease, even if - being asleep - I had necessarily lost my bearings, unable clearly to see where my dreams began. But the doorbell remained my point of reference - the place from which I had come, and the point to which I was bound to return.

"Nice try," they said, patting me warmly on the back, as though I had done terribly well at something - better than anyone could have expected, although not quite as well as someone else they didn't care to tell me about. The words and pats were reassuring, but still I was listening for the doorbell to ring; and now they had sprung away to different places; the part of the room in which I was standing remained dim and inscrutable, but all about me I saw the ends of familiar rooms, like a set of apexes, except that the doorways had been removed, and instead a view of each room seemed to have been glued, as if to construct a kind of collage, in the six-sided empty space about me.

I realised that meaning was multi-faceted, although the shapes of each meaning were different. A man was playing with a set of lines, like a box of pencils; he smiled childishly at me, and, taking the handful of pencils, flipped them first one way, and then the other, as though he were turning an invisible door-handle; he wanted me to see that this kind of meaning was commonplace, and its symmetry was ultimately self-defeating. With a studied expression, he flipped the pencils so that their points faced to the left - "Here" - and then so that they all faced to the right - "There."

"But really they're all the same, don't you see?" was his implicit conclusion.

In another part of the room, a young girl stood surrounded by a chevron of meaning, but the least important thing about the chevron was where it pointed. Rather, the two great sides that flanked her were a kind of conduit for canonical meaning, while the two smaller sides behind her supplied a very different meaning; like beams of light, each pair of meanings refracted among itself, and then the two refracted meanings also blended. I did not understand the figure, or how I was supposed to connect the girl with the shape that surrounded her; and there were many other people, also surrounded by shapes or playing with them, about which I could deduce still less. What I did notice, though, was that meaning could only be generated between two geometric faces; it was a kind of flowing which could not exist if one of the faces was taken away. It was like an electric current; nothing happens until you complete the circuit.

I saw that meaning was a small part of the essence of each object which had become trapped, and that the size of a meaning was determined by the distance between the pairs of faces between which it had been formed. Looking into the views, one by one, I found that in each picture the people with or within the shapes were doing the same thing. Different hands, from different heights, were dismembering doorbells; feet were scurrying about the limited terrain, like mice, trying to see if there was one they had missed. I could not be confident how successful they had been, for even when I craned my neck into each apex, its perspective was invariably crude and ill-fashioned, filled with invisible spaces it would be impossible to see at any angle. Irritably, zealously, the hands were pulling the doorbells to pieces, at first as if time were not on their side, and they had to defuse some potential disaster; - later, with a kind of subdued interest, as if their real motivation were to understand just how a doorbell worked, and how so very many different doorbells, made of different materials and constructed in different ways, could all accomplish the same basic purpose.

But none of the doorbells were familiar ones, and I looked in vain for the door to my flat, above which I knew a particular doorbell with a distinctive white casing had been placed. I was unsure whether these people - although they were really only hands and feet - intended to keep me here by removing the one stimulus which would awaken me; even if they did, this did not concern me, since I felt nevertheless it might still be possible to escape into one of those spaces which could not be seen, and that through the passage of this space I should find myself somewhere else where they could not venture.

Abruptly there was a loud buzzing sound. All of us looked about; one man scrabbled at the table. At last he proudly held up an enormous blue-bottle, its wings beating noisily beneath a ringing glass. He lifted the glass, and the buzzing stopped; a dark motion fled - or rather, darted - through the air; its trajectory was not so much made up of curves as imagined lines, where, ceasing to beat its wings for a moment, it plummeted instantly from one height to another, and then, beating its wings, ascended no less quickly to somewhere quite different, so that it was only visible in stasis. An instant later there was another buzzing sound, much like the first. Again, a wild scramble about all the different rooms. Constrained by their perspectives, men and women who tried to pass from one room to the next seemed to diminish to a dot as they threw themselves toward one apex or another, and then to regain their height as they entered some adjoining picture. This time it was a bell which had been left on the dishwasher, vibrating noisily. Someone lifted it up and put a piece of felt inside it to stifle the sound.

Again, the respite was brief. Another buzzing, much like the two that preceeded it. The men and women shrugged their shoulders, weary with innovation, but unwilling to acknowledge that they could not locate the source of the sound. Together we roamed the various pictures, searching for whatever it was that was making the noise. Clearly none of them wanted to admit that there might, after all, be some doorbell they had failed to find; and while I admired their inventiveness, I also wished a little that it would end. In desperation, knowing that it could only be so long before I put two and two together, one man held up a little triangle with great excitement, and chattered his teeth against it. He must have sensed I was unconvinced, for already something was changing; now the triangle had little strips of papier-mache to deaden its chiming; his teeth too, considered more narrowly, seemed to be composed of different materials; so that, the deeper I looked, the more plausible this explanation became.

And then the buzzing once more. Something sprang behind me, and the buzzing ceased. It was the girl from the chevron, holding a pair of scissors in one hand; in the other she was waving my ears, like a bleached pair of kidneys.

"That settles it," I think she was saying, but she might as soon have been underwater. Soundlessly I complimented her on her ingenuity. Soundlessly, she smiled back at me. Then everyone got bored and curled up under the table, along with the springs and ends of wire, buzzers and cogs they had removed from the doorbells. They were like crumbs which had fallen from the table, but it was as if a reason had gone out of the them, and, not knowing what had been done to them, they no longer knew how to exist.