In Willow's dream she has an intimate conversation with her girlfriend Tara while painting a Sapphic love poem on her bare back. She talks about her unwillingness to leave Tara’s dorm room, a place of comfort and security, but finds herself at college anyway. She struggles to find her place in a bizarre school theater production, apparently "Death of a Salesman", while her friends and classmates are fully costumed, prepared, and ready to go on stage. Her confusion represents her lack of self-confidence, her fear that she still does not fit in or have a place in the world, unlike those around her, who are notably less intelligent but instinctively understand the strange idiosyncratic rules. She wears ordinary clothes, but the others repeatedly comment on the excellence of her "costume", a reference to her fear that her friends do not see what she has grown into, but rather what she was when younger: nerdy and awkward. This fear is confirmed when Buffy strips off her shirt and jeans, revealing the same unfashionable turtleneck and corduroy jumper she wore in episode one of the series, four years earlier, before her demon-fighting experiences and study of magic increased her confidence and competence. Willow stands anxiously at the front of the class, trying to read a paper, while her classmates express their boredom with listening to her and Oz whispers into Tara's ear, until she is attacked by the First Slayer and her breath is sucked out of her body.