California is also, however, the site of real people's homes. Real people's lives. Real lives begun as dreams and perhaps dribbled into boredom. Or unraveled into nightmares. Or fabulously, miraculously achieved. This schism - between what California represents in popular imagination and what it is, what it means to live there, to be from there - means Californians collide constantly with the rupture of existence.

How to dream the life we are already living.