Alice, a teacher, wife, and breast cancer survivor, begins having potent dreams (a mute young girl, chanting women, snakes, knives) that spill into her waking life, combining with fearful flashbacks from her cancer treatment. As the dreams suck her in, Alice helps one of her ESL students, a young Vietnamese woman, flee an abusive husband, and consequently becomes entangled with an offbeat group of women who, in combination with the dreams, help her to come to grips with the anger and fear she has been dealing with since her cancer diagnosis.