A man walks a familiar trail through wet woods, still carrying the memory of a dream. In the dream, he was about to cross an untouched mountain, beyond which his brothers had found a second hollow, wild and overgrown, where even the houseplants were suffocating in their abundance. It's strange but full of possibility. The waking world offers none of that. The trail ends where it always does, at a ridge of dying laurel and brown bracken, and the fog-filled valley glows dully, like a fish's belly.
The details turn quietly grim: a deer urinating in the silence, flies already settling on her pelt as if she were half decayed. The speaker feels flat and a little trapped, a sense the title's "tunnel vision" captures. The ending hits hardest. His camera is heavy, while the dream's version was tiny, and both are "empty." The mood is muted and deflated, a longing for mystery that the ordinary morning can't satisfy.