Nightmares are few and largely partisan. (A Baptist man sees Americans streaming into Mexico and realises that Clinton has won.) Two prominent and predictable themes — sex and death — are perhaps not worth dwelling on, other than to point out that Obama is not the only one whose safety people worry about, nor is he the sole object of romantic desire. Drugs, too, are a common topic. “Hillary Clinton came to my apartment, smoked a bowl with me and a couple [of] friends, then she gave me an iPhone,” an Obama supporter dreamed. “We walked around Seattle for a while. I woke up with a strange feeling of satisfaction that it would be O.K. if she wins.”

Heti had her own candidate dream, about Obama, a few nights after launching the site, although she hasn’t posted it. “We were at the mall or something, and he professed a desire to have an affair with me,” she said, and described a tortured process of indecision. “But I have a boyfriend. But then I thought maybe I ought to, because it’s Barack Obama, and how often do these opportunities come about? Then the dream took another path, and I ended up a prisoner in the basement.”

Excerpted from Ben McGrath’s ‘Dream on’ in The New Yorker, March 10