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There was the obligatory crashing surf, the palm trees. Even a full moon.

From my table at the beach resort restaurant, I listened to the band croon through their small set of songs. Drunken dancers lurched across the terrace. A fine spray misted the tables near the balustrade.

I had wandered by accident into someone else’s dream.

Certain dreams require an arrangement of figures, and I had been chosen as one of these: a girl in a black dress, blurred, perfunctory, strangely capable of thought.

Scenery is not prone to self-reflection, yet there I was. I felt a bemused sense of trespass. This was so clearly not my dream; I had never longed for exotic palms or a whispering foreign sea.

Still, I was grateful. Whatever facile love story was playing out on this terrace, I was only expected to sip my drink, make muted conversation. Meanwhile waves and music and moon were mine for the taking.

I didn’t press my luck. I never joined the men and women pumping their elbows on the dance floor. The awkward ex-pat sitting behind me asked me to dance. I had seen him up there earlier, swaying back and forth in earnest middle-aged innocence. Someone’s teacher, maybe, resurrected for a moment of dreamy illogic and allowed to stay. I shook my head with a smile.

Don’t misunderstand me: I talked about Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Myers-Briggs personality tests. I drank Coca-Cola. At one point we discussed with laughing solemnity how Ghanaian husbands and wives know if their spouses are cheating on them. The answers were the same as anywhere: a sense of distractedness, secret phone calls late at night, a sudden stillness in bed.

But whenever I left the table, I tried to walk as women walk in dreams. Where were my high heels? I was out of costume. I could only shuffle where I was supposed to sway.

The fish I ordered was served whole, eye socket empty, open mouth refusing to gasp. When I turned it over, its silvery underside was bare of breading. It scowled at me. Each time I tried to swallow, I spat out a slim, resentful bone.

And the whole time, the dream was about to end, could not possibly go on any longer. Empty glasses collected on the tables. The band kept playing a last song, and then it started up again, and the dancers came back, no more graceful than before.

I could have taken the steps down to the beach. I could have slouched to the bar, stood there, a languid line smoking a cigarette. There were many ways to leave.

Instead, I reached up to tug the lowhanging fronds of the palm trees. The tips were withered, pale and dry and dying. I pulled gently. They didn’t break.