But I am more than a shadow

At first, I think I'm watching a Paul Thomas Anderson picture. Only, it's no Paul Thomas Anderson picture that I've ever seen before. And suddenly I realize, I'm not watching a Paul Thomas Anderson picture, I'm in a Paul Thomas Anderson picture. The two child characters with me in the scene stare at me with grim faces full of distrust as I try unsuccessfully to convince them of our situation. A glaring sun overhead anesthetizes the chromatics in the vaguely familiar suburbia, and it sounds like it might be late spring or early summer. "This isn't it," I say, "this isn't it at all." She turns to him, squinting in the light, and I can see it in their dirt-brushed cheeks, their popsicle-stained lips. When I wake with the phantoms of my pleas still echoing in the cold February morning, I discover I've woken too early, as I suspected I would.