Killcount

Mandy and I are at the bottom of the ocean, on the bed of the sea. The waters are filled with squids and jellyfish and octopi, gun metal grey, rabbit red eyes. We kill them all to death, until the waters are red and black with blood.

We are now in prison, we are now in court, we are now in custody, held hostage by our actions. The court house is underwater, the very scene of the crime. We are asked if we are responsible for the death of the creatures. We lie ... I lie. She lies. We all lie together.

They ask us again. They ask us one final time. We cave. We give. We speak truth together. We are condemned. We are sentenced. We are imprisoned beneath our watery grave. I wake.

Hot-Pink Hyena-Dogs

The Dreaming is attacking the dreamer. I am trapped between a wall of tall cliff and a wall of tall water. It slams into me, darkly, deathly. It bludgeons and bullies me, batters and beats me, until I am barely there. I am a mere whisper of who I once was. I am a meager echo of what I once could have been. I hold a life in my hand, young, innocent, fragile. Not unlike my own a very long time ago, and not unlike my own right now. The life is a kitten’s and I must breathe for it … even as I cannot breathe for myself, between the crushing, smashing weight of those walls. It presses me away. It presses me inland. It presses me home. It presses me to end.

I hang on.

We are inside. We are within. In the gullies of Dream. We are being chased by hot-pink hyena-dogs through the wood and through the trees. My babies are here. My kiddos. My charges. I don’t know how to teach this subject. We run. You cannot fall behind. It is as simple and as impossible as that. You learn it fast. You do it faster. We wade a river. We slip inside the back entrance of a hotel in the middle of the forest. We must find the man, who has the answer to a question, who has the key to a lock. The hyenas slip inside behind us, through the cracks in the windows and doors, through the wood of the rafter and the black of the basement. We must reach him, before they reach us.

We do.

Hotel safe, children safe, dark defeated for now, answers gotten and forgotten, keys kept only to be lost … I awaken.

Shadows

This dream is not my own. It is the dream of the man who sleeps next to me at night. It is a dream caressed and carved from the flesh of my own Dreaming. And this is it.

There is a dark shadow. It waits in the dark shadows. Behind the wall and behind the door waiting for its chance. Its chance to sit upon me. Like a dog upon a cat. Like a god upon a man. Powerful. Possessive. Persecuting.

Each time the man drifts to dream, the shadow runs. It runs from behind the door and behind the wall to get what it had been waiting for. Me. To oppress and to overwhelm. Me. To engulf into the dark and the shadow of itself. Me.

He snaps his eyes wide open to scare it away. To scare away the shadow and to save his love. Me. It runs back to the door and to the wall. Back to the dark shadows within which it is a dark shadow. It is a game they play for a while. All night to be exact. He is tired the morning after.

Dedicated to Testament, who saves me from the dark and the shadows, even in my dreams...

House of Dog

I am in a neighbourhood. A neighbourhood with a school to which I go. In this neighbourhood there is a great beast. A black beast. A dog, tall as telephone poles, huge as houses, terrifying as the sleeping dark. He snacks on the rooms of houses. And he is looking for me to snack on me too. To chew on me. To chomp on me. To devour me. To gobble me up whole. As he gobbles the rooms of houses up whole in his relentless search for my flesh, and for my femurs. I strap myself to the underbelly of a blue forde truck, the license plate starting with X marks the spot. The owners of the truck, aware of my presence within and beneath, have to drive me past the house of dog, as is my directive in the dreaming. We watch the loyal glare of the house dog's own eyes, the scent of my fear much more than a mere whiff wafting through the air, and under its nose and palette. It lets me escape.

Thing

I am in the dreaming. There is a beast here. It is as an ogre or troll. It is as the Grendel. Only in deep and final sleep can it be found. Only in the sleep within sleep can it be seen. It is to this sleep I sink, within the dark of the Dreaming.

It follows me. It chases me. I sense it but I cannot see it. I see its shadow but I cannot know its why, not until I sleep that deep and final sleep. I run throughout the dreaming, I race against the powerlessness of my dreams, throughout white icy caverns, throughout blackened, charred pits until I sink deep within the dark of slumber.

I see its face. It is hideous. Grotesque. I hear its name, but the conscious cannot conceive the sepulchral utterance of its curse. I smell the sharp sulfur of its existence within the deep and dark of me and taste my recurring fears. I feel its movements within the dreaming, beneath the unconscious, before my eyes flutter and I simply awake into a room as bright as day compared to the darkness of the where and thing I’ve just left behind .... if only for tonight.

The Fire Coral Narwhal and the Old Defeated God

I am walking on the shore of the sea with my loves. We are happy for the waters of the skies are blue, and we have each other and life is good.

Suddenly I sense a grave and dreadful danger behind us. The others are given to keeping the pace laid-back and leisurely, but regardless I rush and hurry them inland with haste, seconds before we glance behind us to see the fire-coral red hull of a giant narwhal bearing down upon us, borne with great speed on the waves of malice and killing intent. The eyes, sharp as teeth and shining like the morning star, emanate hate like the roots of all evil.

We make it inland, to the houses on stilts, and there I bear witness to the beginning of the end. Ensconced in the precarious safety of those stilted houses, I watch as an old god, gray as a fisherman, shoot tarot cards with runic quivers from an invisible bow out to sea. With each tarow he strikes the red beast, provoking its fury and unleashing its ire upon the hapless human souls too long and slow upon the sea's shore. As he controls its anger so too does he control the very fate and fabric of the human lives within its reach and realm.

I shoot a runic arrow from my own invisible bow, but without a card I have no real connection to or dominion over his divinity. Realising my awareness, he morphs from god to man, in which form I cannot see or touch his divinity. He is now Bryan of the Advocate, and as he tells to me in a voice wise with deception and duplicity, “You know, you can make a fortune with just the laces of your shoes”, from the Dreaming I thus depart.

Of Serpents and Servants and Sally Dog Tales

There is a serpent. Its scales are vermillion and indigo. I can see it under the cellar of the new house. I can see it through the cracks in its walls. It is circling and spiralling, crawling and stalking the servant and I in the house that should be safe.

We run. We run from the house, down the driveway and into the street. Sally is trapped behind the gate. She is trapped for I cannot reach her. She is trapped for she cannot reach the road. The serpent crashes through the ceiling of the new house, rams through its roof, and as it hoists its feathers-shaped wing of white and blue and green geometric patterns towards the sky, I realise it is not a serpent, but a winged and serpentine dragon.

Now Sally hoists a wing to the sky as well, geometric patterns and hues of green, blue and white identical to the beast’s. I understand that this is happening because I do not wish her to be squashed or to be killed. This is my will exerted upon the fabric of the dream within which I now exist. She will be seen as kindred to the serpent, she will not be seen at all. Either way, she is safe. The servant and I run. We run down the road, with the dragon in pursuit.

We board a van in Speightstown, hoping to lose ourselves in the human horde. The van drives off, but no one else onboard seems to notice the beast flying frantically behind us, searching for the servant and her master. When they finally do notice however, no one is more surprised than I, that no panic or chaos ensues, but rather that all falls silent instead. We can feel the dragon eyes, feel it evaluating and analysing our energy signature, trying to seek us out in the throng.

We watch with baited breath, wondering if the dragon will rend and tear the bus from the rear. We watch with baited breath as it flies past us, onward, in its seeking to destroy. We watch with baited breathe acutely relieved that it did not capture either of our eyes. We watch as it makes the left and turns, rounding the corner by Rock Dundo, and disappearing around the bend.

The servant and I return to the house in search of a runic glyph in a deck of card hidden in the tween-where within the walls. This card will destroy the beast. But it is very clever our dragon, it is gloriously clever, and it doubles back upon us, trying to reach us before we can reach the card of death. The entity which gifted us with the card returns to reclaim it as well. It is the quintessence of desire, this race against time, this race against hope, this race without end.

Unlike the dream in which the racing itself does begin.

The Island of Tortured Crops

The land is plagued by daemon. They torture the people of the rock. I run away on a maxi-taxi horse with no name. I run from the country to the old neighbourhood to escape the legions pursuing me.

I must enter a strange and unfamiliar house. I must lock each door as I enter each room. This will slow them down, but stop them it cannot.

I reach the last room. In that final room, behind the last door there is a man tied to the post of a tree. He is just a man, and only an example of any other man. I must torture him to free myself. I take up the blow torch and I cleave the skin from his flesh with one hundred percent accuracy. As if it were practiced. As if it were writ. As if I were already a daemon myself.

The flesh glows orange in the wake of the torch like the coals and embers and fires of hell. Blood pours from the open chasm of those wounds like a river from the urn of life.

I must tie the man even more in an attempt to bind and lock the door. The moment I finish, the moment I turn to the door, the one leading to my freedom, the daemon pursuing me enters the room.

He tells me to keep walking, to keep moving and to never look back, and this I do gladly. The moment I cross the threshold however, I feel the tide shift, and I hear him beckoning me to return.

I keep walking. I do not so much as hesitate. The humans, the tortured, are scattered across the land, are scattered across the country, are scattered across the world.

They move in mysterious ways, full of electricity and energy, full of intensity and spark, dashing and shivering like lightning, only to slow, only to stop, their movements becoming stiff as they strike myriad poses, like flies, like dead things, only to zoom away once again.

The grace and fluidity of life has been bled from their bodies, but the bodies remember the song. The daemon find this dance and drama amusing, for they are the farmers, and they have harvested well. We, the mere crops, have been reaped and have been yielding.

This is the end. The scene is dead, the story is dying and so is the small world on the stage. Here halts the dreaming. Beautiful nightmares to you all...

King Kong and the Magick Flute of Humanness

I am being chased by a crazy and enfuried gargantuan ape. It is a typical dream of pursuit and so I skip to its end. He is holding me over a towering cliff of a green, fern-coated hill and just before he crushes me, drops me, I whip out a magick flute an play a weird and whimsical melody. Truly bizarre. Surely fae. He is at once transformed into a human, with giant, meaty, hefty, fleshy-coloured hands in which I am still flailing. Yet somehow, I manage to push him over the edge, while I remain at the peak of that precipice, looking down on him flailing as he grasps a knotty knoll, a colossal grassy root that can take his super-human weight.

Out of nowhere, leaps a strange lad who snatches the flute from my hands and trips over the edge of the cliff face with it. I looked below me to see him land in the King’s outstretched palm, and I know, sure as anything, what is about to take place. He will play my odd little melody backwards, and in reverse, and restore the meaty manimal beneath me to his original form and fury. I turn to run even as I hear the bizarre melody backward and the enraged roar of a man turning into a beast. The pursuit is on once again and I return from the dreaming to awaken. May the dreams of fae befall you on this night ...

Of small towns and first loves

A man goes back to visit his hometown, a small town, with his new, beautiful wife. She wants very much to be a part of his story, to belong to his home and his life and his world. But he ignores her desire, and one day she finds out why.

He used to play sports with all of his friends, most of whom were male and one of whom told her that one of them was not; his first love. She played sports with the guys, with him, on the team. And she was the reason why he couldn’t include his wife. His wife did not belong, was not a part of the memory of the past that he shared with his special and significant someone else. She was only the present. Only ever the future.

The moment she is told, she understands, she is envious, and she accepts. You loved her. You must still like her a lot, and she must be so beautiful, god damn her, I must like her too. She must be the kind of beautiful that makes you love a person instantly and for always. Something of this reminds me of a Mandy Moore movie.

Shortly, briefly after, there is a terrible accident. One around the pillars in which the scene is set, in which the dream is lain. I don’t know why she ... there is a terrible accident ... and a train runs off a bridge. Part of it lands up right on a perpendicular bridge and another part of it slips and slides and skids down between the two bridges, and swings back and forth like a clock’s pendulum in the curve of an upside down arc below.

The wife is on the bridge when it happens but that is not when she dies. She stands there, waiting, for the second carriage, the one that swings like the pendulum beneath the perpendicular bridge to swing free. It swings back and forth and it comes back again, and every time it does, the space between the two bridges widens even more.

So she stands there waiting for the space to widen and for the carriage to swing free, until that very last swing, where it doesn’t and she knows, all hope riding on that moment, that if it was to swing free that it would have had to have been then.

She knew that if it didn’t swing free then and there, it would be the end.

The first carriage of the train, the one standing upright, falls flat upon her and the perpendicular bridge, taking her, taking it all, along with the second carriage of the train swinging in the curve of the arc beneath, down below into the water, and even further below that. I feel the impact, I feel it crush, and tear, and break, and mangle her body, and I hear her release ...

The softest cry of pain as she sinks beneath the surface of the waters, and dies, and is gone for always.

The man watches from the other bridge, powerless to save her, and he asks himself why didn’t she move, what did she wait for, why did she allow the choice to be taken out of her control, why didn’t she move herself, for herself, why didn’t she move. They had a baby girl. A daughter who’s now motherless because her mother was too weak.

Too weak to move, too weak to make the decision for herself, too weak to make the choice. Too weak.

Now he runs over his memories of their short, brief time together in his hometown, the way he ignored her, the reason why. He flashes back and he feels as if life has come to an end, because his life has come to an end, now that hers has.

And he’s walking and he’s numb and he passes his first love. She is an exotic daylight dancer. He looks at the small triangles of her breasts, and at the varying sizes of the triangles of the breasts of all her fellow dancers. Topless and beautiful, they sit in an obento box, wearing brightly-coloured, floral-printed skirts; and he remembers his new, beautiful wife and what she said.

You loved her. You must still like her a lot, and she must be so beautiful, god damn her, I must like her too. She must be the kind of beautiful that makes you love a person instantly and for always. Something of this reminds me of a Mandy Moore movie. She is the reason why. She was the reason why.

He remembers her attempt to be included in his home, and in his life, and in his small town, hometown world, and he ignores the memory of her words the same way he ignored her. The dreaming ends and I awake with an aching sense of loss and grief for these people.

People I’ve never met, people I’ll never meet, in all of my life.

(And it prompts me to send asinine, exceptionally inappropriate and utterly unnecessary text messages in the dead of 3:50 a.m. in the early morn.)

Sweet dreams ...

Vodun Priest . Crimson Death . Yesteryear and Yore .

I dream of Beauty and the Beast. I dream of my mother dying. I dream of being chased.

I am running down the highway of dreams ... the Highway of Springing Gardens. I am being chased by an enemy, unknown and all red. They are beast and I am beauty. They are death and I am my mother. The crimson blood of their clothing is predator and I am prey. They chase and I run.

And presently I am running with others. Others are being chased with me. Others are the beauty, the mother, the prey. They are known and all white. They are the people of yesteryear and some are the loves of today. Me and my mate fall behind to protect our charges. One of the enemy, one of the Red, face off with us. It is a confrontation. A showdown. He is tenacious. I can tell.

He looks like a witch doctor in his blood red tuxedo garbs. He looks like a vodun priest of yore. He wears a top hat and his face is wizened ... senile ... insane. My mate and I transform into sparks and shimmer, unseen to all eyes but his own. I wonder in passing if this is how all the faeries died. Were they murdered by the priests who could see them, the priests who told everyone that they did not exist at all?

We obliterate our crimson enemy, vanquishing him though more of him still come. We rejoin the other people we defend, who greet us joyfully even as we run. I fly over head, my mate covering us from the rear, as we make our way through the Town of Bridges, leading my people onward as we go. I wonder briefly, shortly, if I have died.

I am dragged from the dreaming by the reality of oversleeping.

Of faeries and gateways and death by dark water

There are two faerie girls. They are travelling across gateways and bridges, dreams and clear waters to visit the island … Barbados. They are off on adventures I cannot see, but can well dream.

They return in the dark of the night, happy-frolicking-trip, their skins covered in runic tattoos, telling tales of where they have been. They are crossing dreams and gateways and bridges to return to their fae island in yon distance, but where water once was clear is now murky and dark with the weeds and kelp of seas.

One faerie girl ignores the omen, diving off the bridge with goddess grace only to sink beneath the kelp and weeds and waters ... never to touch toe to sand ... never to resurface again.

On the bridge all left-behind hearts are silent-wailing and broken, as is the dream from which I awake.

Dark Magick Laughing Boujee Chase

The old house. I am here. In the rooms. In the yard. In the land. It is dusk. It is twilight. The sun sets, and night falls. I am alone. Momentarily, the air is filled with … presence.

A dreamy, chiming, magick presence … like faeries … like witches … like the fates and the muses of Dream. Presently there’re women, in the sky, beautiful ladies in all the air.

It is filled with their cackling, tinkling laughter and sounds of legerdemain. It is filled with a pins and needles apprehension, a feeling of unease and ill-will.

The ladies land and walk down my lane and come to my windows and stand by my gate. I run into the old house. I secure the windows. I secure the doors.

I hear knocking. I hear evil. I hear madness on the move. I feel it in the atmosphere. But they are new house windows. They are new house doors. Let the darkness and madness come.

I pull back the curtain of the front door and am greeted by two girls. They are boujee. They have boujee hair. Boujee eyes and noses and cheeks and faces. Boujee smiles on their boujee lips. Superior, spiteful, sweet.

They want into the old house. But I shall not let them. They try the side door by the drive way. Past the garage and all around. They try the back door by the yard. Past the old room and all around. They try the galvanized gate in the rusty metal paling. Past the old land and all around.

They try every entrance. Not one can be breached. We run around, back and forth, in and out, above and below, until it is done.

The boy Logan (Seek and Ye Will Never Find)

I am in the old house. I am a tiny, electromagnetic human computer, programmed to seek and ye shall find. Rivenis is my brother. He too is a tiny humanoid machine. We are looking for the boy Logan. I do not know what he is, or what he is programmed to do, but it smells of love, and is written in feeling and reeks of the unrequited.

Two men arrive to take me away. They shut me down and turn me off that I may be unconscious. There is a place, a person, a light far away, and we are moving farther from it. Our orders come from there. It sends Rivenis with us. He is assigned to protect me and to inform me of my own assignment. There is something I must do. Find the boy Logan. I drift. I accept. I submit. I give in.

The two men drive us down the Spring Garden highway to Bridgetown. One is driving. The other is receiving orders from The Light. My feet are in Rivenis’ lap. He has his orders too. The man in the passenger seat presently takes note of my hairy android legs, and unable to help himself, proceeds to start scenting my feet and kissing my toes and biting my heels; he is plucking the hair of my legs with his teeth. I drift.

Now he climbs into the backseat, and in positions impossible in that slightest of spaces, proceeds to take me. It does not feel like rape, because this is all from his perspective, and so it feels like pleasure. It is neither my pain nor my perspective, and so it feels like love. Like I have no will for it to be against. Rivenis does not protect me. I feel revulsion, for this is not my assignment, and he has failed his own. Find the boy Logan. I accept it.

When it is over and finished and done, we stop at the traffic lights at the Esso gas station at the bottom of the highway, at the beginning of town, and we take the left. The Dreaming lurches and I suddenly find myself thrown into a pool with African Maidens. A lone warrior is there. I know him not though he is reminiscent of my father. I must place the soggy, dilapidated sandals of the maidens onto their feet beneath the facade and the movement of the waters. It is a ritual. I submit.

There is fire and darkness in some distant part of the Dreaming. Perhaps the car we were driving crashed. Perhaps the gas station at the bottom and the beginning of the road, blew up. I am sad for I did not find the boy Logan. I did not seek and find. Now I am surrounded by waters, above and below, within and without, around and away. There is a bar. Alcohol is the blood and sweat and tears of the Morningstar. Do not touch. Do not give in.

Surrounded by African Maidens and a lone warrior, I step out of a television, for I no longer desire to participate in the Ritual of Sandals. They are disappointed. They wanted me to stay, and to want to stay. I however, depart. There are several tapes of several African movies my father has left behind him in his wake to return. Several more he has taken with him wherever he now wanders. I pack a suitcase. My mother cries alcohol. Now I can give in. Now I can give into it.

The Dreaming dies to reality and I return.

Travelling Nightmares, Faerietale Dreams

I am travelling through worlds ... through forests, through mountains, across oceans. I settle on an island waiting for you to find me, waiting for you to love me ... forever. Now I am being pursued, into an alley, into a dead end, He has been chasing me. He is not you. Desperate I phase through the solid grey brick of the wall to my left and find myself through air, and wood and stone to the other side, to the inner side of a crimson castle. You are waiting there, Dream. You are kind. You care. You love, and you are lovely. You give me protection … sanctuary … hope. You are generous. You are considerate. You are compassionate. All the things he is not, everything I am no longer. He phases past the crimson curtain, those blood red drapes that veil the portal into your kingdom. He phases through air and wood and stone to land by our side mere inches between us. But he is clumsy in his transcendence and smashes the wood and stone in his passage. He is here, a snarling menace beyond ready to attack, to crush us with his dark and wicked will. But he cannot harm us here, not me, least of all you. You take my hand, my soul, my spirit and you guide it, leading me down into the dark of the corridor to a time and a place and a home and a how, where he cannot follow. And I am safe. And I am loved. You love me. The Dreaming comes to a close.

Dark Doll

I am in a strange bedroom, it is unfamiliar and foreign to me, but at the same time it is also vaguely reminiscent of my room in Augusta and my room in the old house. My parents are there, somewhere, in another room. I cannot see them but I can hear them and feel their presence upon the Dreaming. I am readying myself for bed. I am preparing the room for the coming of the night time wolf. I make sure all the doors are locked, all the windows are shut, the covers are pulled up tight.

He is here. He cannot get in through the doors or the windows. I pull the covers down and tread softly to the door. I open it. There is no wolf. Instead there is a doll. It is male. It is soft and plushy, neither hard nor plastic. He has long, stringy, damp looking hair. He has dark circles beneath his eyes. He is dressed like a gothic prince, and reminds me of the artist, quiet and refined, like Keanu Reeves, Neil Gaiman, or Johnny Depp. The smile on his face is both sickly and sick.

The Red Girl and the Dark Panther

I am the Red Girl. I am red because I am wearing a red hooded coat, and so the Red Girl is what I am called. I am a waitress in a tavern, the walls are made of red clay brick and the interior is duskily lit from the lanterns’ lights’ muted glow, creating a cozy, bronzed atmosphere, almost as if we were in an underground cavern, deep within the earthen bowels.

I serve a tray of food to a man and his woman seated on the far right of the cavernous tavern, beneath a lantern light’s muted glow. On the tray is a dirty baby turtle. He is alive and wading in stew. He is adorable. To my horror the man plucks him out of the sauce and pops him into his mouth, commenting as he chews with his mouth full how delicious and succulent live, baby turtles happen to be.

Then he plucks the baby turtle out of his mouth, seemingly unharmed and still alive and offers me a taste. Naturally I couldn’t bear to eat anything alive, least of all something so cute, so I pop it into my mouth, with a sigh of relish and a rub of my tummy and a nod in thanks and walk back to the kitchen in the black back of the building before I remove it from my mouth and place it gently on the kitchen floor.

To the far left of the tavernous cavern, lit by the light of the lanterns’ glow throughout the room is a thick, heavy wooden door, held to the wall by a thick, heavy, corded rope. Releasing the knot that kept the door shut, I slipped outside of the tavern into the shadows of the beyond night. Here it is like a junk yard but without the junk, just mounds and piles and heaps and stacks of rock and rubble and stone intermittently peopling an otherwise empty space.

It is here, to the far left, in the deepest shadows, I espy a silhouette of a large, cat, a dark cat … The Dark Panther. He has sighted me. He is now slowly, slowly, slowly coming. I run back to the thick, heavy wooden door, yank it open and make to retie the rope. But the rope is no longer there. There is now a string, thin, light, weak string, that couldn’t possibly hold the weight of the door closed to the wall.

I try valiantly to bind the door closed with the flimsy, fragile twine, knowing that with each passing moment the dark panther, made of shadows, made of menace, was nearing the door, nearing my doom. The door keeps slipping open as the corded string keeps slipping loose. He is here. He is behind the door. His intent is overwhelming. I can feel his breathe through the cracks of the wood. His strength is my weakness.

Suddenly he rears up and what was a mere moment ago an animal is now a man, yet retaining his bestial being, his primal, instinctive essence. Now I am on the outside, on the other side of the door. Now he is slamming me against the thick, heavy, wooden wall of it, just as he slams his tongue into the depths of my open mouth. I feel plunged into, I feel wrench away from myself to float in the mindless, sense-full, rapture of the moment. His eyes echo eternity as they behold me and I am flung without ceremony from The Dreaming.

Spirit and Dirt

I am in an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar place. Above me a spirit floats. I believe it is female but I an uncertain. Malevolent pressure is pushing down upon me, but I know not what it wants or what it means.

I run from my room into the room of my father and stepmother, which is down the hall. Again the room in not known to me, and neither is the place. I crawl into bed between them as a small child would. The spirit follows me and enters the room, but does not express or manifest itself as a floating woman again.

This time it is merely a Presence, and then the room is filled with earth and dirt as though an invisible excavator entered the room as an unseen force. We all run out into the hallway of that strange hotel. From the outside and through the floor-length curtains we could see the level of dirt rising higher in equal proportions as though the dirty were being poured into the room like water into a cup, except rising from the ground rather than being poured from the ceiling.

The sea of dirt is disturbed by the occasional tuff of grassy turf. Behind the glass wall and curtain panel it seems as a sea without ebb or flow … Without undulation. The Dreaming ends.

The Daemon of Sands

I am walking away from the old house and I feel as though I am walking home. There are people with me, and though they feel familiar within The Dreaming, I do not know them in The Real. We are walking down the road, away from the first church, in the dead of the night, disturbed only by the light of the street lamp.

Suddenly a sand jinn, a daemon of sand, swirls before us, sucking us under and into itself like quicksand. Very soon I will be lost forever. Oblivion awaits … a long-forgotten home. I awake from The Dreaming but am not yet within The Real. Instead I am within a tween time … a tween place … a place of lucidity and of waking dreams.

My eyes still closed, the daemon Diablo screams before the black screen behind them saying, “Why are you so afraid?! This is nothing new or strange! You have been here before!” I do not know what he is talking about.

Now, there is a pressure on me, and I cannot rouse or raise myself. I cannot lift my eyes. I cannot inhale air and breathe, and when I finally do manage to crack my eyelids, heavy as they are with sleep and fear, there is a Presence before and above and around me. Although I can’t see it, I can feel it clearly.

I am fully awakened by the sound of my garbled and inarticulate groans as I struggle to escape the Presence and the dream state. When I roll over onto my side and fall asleep again however, the Dream, as I feared it would, did not resume.

Thing

I am once more with the mer-goblin. We are once again the closest of friends. However he is different somehow. Instead of being green, he is a light creamy colour, and his limbs are rounded like a teddy bears, and do not have any digits. He appears a fusion of his original authentic self and my avatar on Karma Games, a gothy-cute plushy thing which is also a light creamy colour.

We are on the sofa of the old living room suite in the old house. Now we are on a placid lake in a small sailing boat watching the setting of the sun. The colours are autumnal and evening and tween … golden, fiery, fierce and bright, coalescing with the darker cooler colours of the lake. I am dressed as a 19th century lady, complete with a light-weight parasol.

I want to row out some more, further, towards the centre of the lake, but the goblin advises me again it. He tells me there is something out there larger, more menacing and more violent than any threat or nemesis I’ve ever faced. Then I can feel it, in the subtle rippling, undulations of the water. I can see its form and shape, dark and indistinct, beneath the surface of the water, almost as large as the lake itself. I knew if I dared to row nearer to it, my death would have been immediate, vicious and merciless.

Frightened I row back to the shore of the lake with the mer-goblin and we disembark the small sailing boat. The Dreaming ends.