YEARS AGO, when I was in my early twenties, long before I ever saw anything of Dallas, I dreamed about it on several successive nights. In these dreams I was walking along the edge of a busy, fast-flowing road. The lane markings were illuminated from within the asphalt, and the road curved and sloped gently upward toward a cluster of skyscrapers that grew larger as the dream and the road continued. As I walked, I looked up at a sign on which this artery’s name was backlit: North Dallas Tollway.

In terms of my imaginings of an ideal, shining city, these dreams could hardly have been less subtle. (Indeed, I wasn’t aware of ever having returned to a dream before.) I didn’t think about them again for years, however, until I first flew to Dallas as a pilot. After we landed and went through immigration and customs, our crew bus pulled away from the terminal and proceeded from one wide road to another, until I saw a sign ahead, not for the North Dallas Tollway, but for the Dallas North Tollway, which we turned onto and followed in the direction of our hotel.

Later I told a friend from Dallas about how I’d had more than one dream about a highway that I didn’t know her city did, in fact, possess, and we laughed at the similarity between the dreamed and real names. Surely, we speculated, I must have encountered the real one—in a newspaper, on the TV news, or maybe even on Dallas, the soap opera—but not remembered doing so. And then for some reason it had stayed with me, encoded, in a jumbled form, by a line of dutiful neurons, though perhaps, as the years turned, their voltage began to fade a little, and some even began to grow uncertain of what they stood for, until the night I flew to Dallas and came upon the real road.