Dreamland Noir.
Transcribed from memory* by DrWadata
(*Memory is a fairy tale.)
Editor’s note: My horrid brute of a colleague, DrWadata, won’t shut up about his recent adventures in Dreamland. Below is his…transcription of the time he spent there. Do with it as you will. Personally, I’m tired of hearing about it.
-AH
Chapter 1: Meeting of the Minds
The evening wasn’t cool.
Wasn’t warm.
Was precisely, almost conspicuously room temperature, if the room were outer space…
not the way outer space is, just the way it feels sometimes when you’re in a certain kind of mood and you’re feeling very small and standing on a giant rock in a lonely solar system and dreaming up some pretentious bit of poetry that no one will ever read.
I know now that we’d been sitting there for fucking hours around a big black table in the backyard patio area of some local dive.
Someone struck a match.
Someone was laughing.
I wasn’t paying very close attention.
There we were, the glitterati of the emotionally destitute, all chittering away at our idle business. A “wall of sound” of white noise composed mostly of clinking beer bottles and stunted laughs and defensiveness. Shifting feet and prosaic nonsense in an empty void in an overcrowded space — a mad race to justify our lives in the face of a self-induced avalanche of aimless insecurity.
I remember feeling fairly pissed off, agitated, just generally settled into what Stevie Ray might well have called a Rude Mood. Like I wanted to start a fight with someone bigger than me, and I wanted to lose.
She pulled a long deadly drag from a dying cigarette.
She inhaled aggressively, like she could actually steal a tiny bit of death from an inanimate object if she really tried hard enough.
But it wasn’t really theft — the process did nothing to slow the destruction of the cigarette itself; in fact, it only hastened it. You can’t kill death, after all — you can only spread it around to the things you love.
So there they both burned, the woman and the cigarette — the one chasing the other to the grave.
I think I remember wishing I’d found anything about that train of thought interesting when she said something like, “woke up.”
I shifted my weight, felt a chill run across my shoulders.
She was attractive in the sense of powerful, in the sense of seemingly unintentional but definitely not an accident. She burned. She sucked death deep into her lungs, and she blew black smoke back out.
“…Benadryl. Totally fucked me right up. I spent the whole next morning in a groggy daze. Barely sure I woke up from it at all, loves.”
“Yesss oh my god I know exactly what you mean!” He was attractive and effeminate — exaggeratedly so; if I’d dreamed him up myself he’d sure as hell is overrated be considered a totally unacceptable stereotype in today’s enlightened, public-facing New York City culture.
The fat one clicked its tongue nervously. Its eyes were fixed on a far off corner of the yard, like they’d just watched a cat moonwalk up a wall, and now they were busy making a conscious decision to forever remember this moment as just another one in which they’d never seen the impossible.
“Mmm, of course, dream within,” the fat one intoned distractedly. “I think we’ve all been there, after all.”
I couldn’t make my mind up about who to bother being pissed off at.
We all want to deny the impossible. I, for one, choose to believe that the impossible is waking up and finding myself all decked out in the trappings of a life of suffocating normality.
May it always be night time in this stupid fucking bar. May we never wake up.
“Yard, honey. We’re in a yard.”
A yard behind a bar. Whatever.
“Annnyway…it was Benadryl what slayed me dear, and as sure as shit is brown I dreamt that night dream after dream after stupid sketchy dream.

“Can you imagine that?”
Sometimes I think beautiful people tend to be conspicuously crass just to prove that they can get away with it and still be desirable. Fuck she was hot.
“Thanks, love.”
You know, I’ve had a dream like that too.
They’d been staring at me all along. Silent. The whole fucking bar — taking a slow sip of their beverages in Lynchian synchronicity and waiting for me to finish. I’m at the head of one long table under a patchwork quilt of rustling tree branches and dying leaves desperately clinging to something rooted under a collapsing ozone layer within an expansive lonely universe that’s sitting nowhere at all as it slowly dissipates and it’s raining.
It’s not raining.
Then again, perhaps it was…
I had a dream once before that was trippy as all shit, like you would not even believe.
“And then?”
She let the last bit of her cigarette balance precariously between her lips…left it just dangling there so you couldn’t stop yourself from desperately staring at her just to see if it would finally fall; and by the time you realized that she was always in control you couldn’t be bothered to wonder what her damaged little motives might have been for stealing your attention because you just desperately want to fucking believe in the stupid adolescent fairy tale that this boring world still produces a person every so often that oozes terrifying, unadulterated confidence, the kind that grows more attractive when they know that they’ve got you.
“Focussss babe — you’re losing the audience!”
Fuck the audience and fuck you too.
Sorry. Look — my point is I took something once. It went to my head. I took it and I went to sleep, and in the morning I woke up…and I woke, and I woke…but I could never really wake up, ya dig?
“Honestly dear who says ya d…”
Shut up.
What I’m saying is, I fell asleep, then I had a dream. Then in that dream, I had a dream.
Can you imagine what I’m getting at?
His hair was brown. Her hair was red. Her hair was blonde, and it was blue with black tips that faded and he was stroking her long thin arm gently and she just loved it, and I burned.
“Well dear, what then?”
Well, as best I can tell, I’m pretty sure I only ever woke up from the last one.
Now what do you make of that?
Back to that Other Place
Indeed.
“Sorry…what?”
Tug the string. Make the yo-yo spin, but don’t snap the thread — pull with your mind, not with your hands.
Gravity exists here, lives free in this place. Very likely, so do the other forces of the universe, one might suppose, if they weren’t to think too hard about it. But all their guns are cocked and aimed at you.
Gravity from the center. The sun and its explosive gas and light, just over your eyes far off in the distance, along with every other star that matters so much less to you because you can’t really see it right now.
And you.
Your mind is the source of all gravity; the giant planet in an otherwise empty solar system you dreamt up yourself.
Then again, calling a mind yours is misleading, and despite your influence sometimes it harbors refugees from hostile places in your head and your heart.
There she was.
He was.
It was.
It was…raining.
Then again, perhaps it wasn’t…
Vanity, vanity…an angry god lying on the grass on a sunny afternoon and fretting to no one in particular that they’d eaten too many carbs the night before.
Well, fuck, man…what do you want?
And then, there it is. Or at least, there it was. You know that now, the memory that is. And so it is, as soon as it’s already been.
(oh my darling clementine)
f
Goodmorning
It feels like night time down here.
No, that isn’t right…
It feels like a day with no sun.
“Tell me… Have you ever thought about a rat?”
A rat is an intelligent creature — it survives in the muck, and the filth, and beneath the decaying corpse-transferring mechanisms of the New York City subway system.
Rats form pairs; make friends; get bored; scavenge for food.
Rats survive.
In the context of American English colloquial nonsense, the term ‘rat’ generally tends to call to mind a cheat, a liar, a disease-infested thing; certainly not one to be trusted.
I can’t be the only one to notice that the human race reeks of overripe jealousy, can I?
Ah, the sublime loneliness of the clever — to see the human race for the rats they are in the truest sense of the word, and have no one worth explaining it to. After all, if you could have followed me this far, you’d have already arrived here yourself.
Ah, the sublime loneliness of the arrogant asshole…
The rats seem to nod as I squint into the darkness. The whining of some metal sardine cans slowing to something less than the speed of sonic fireworks echoes behind me as I strut awkwardly, stride embarrassedly toward the bottom of a staircase lined with much and self-afflicted irony, rotting beneath the ground where only rats and their filthy commuter-human acquaintances would ever see fit to dwell.
He shoved me as he marched past. He was wearing a suit, or maybe a blazer. He had an eye patch and green hair. He was paid a great of money deal to look homeless. He wore a conspicuously expensive watch on his left wrist, and he was in a hurry.
He shoved me as he passed, and gruffly muttered something that sounded more like a derision than an apology.
He was late.
It’s (as interesting as anything else, I guess) to me how human beings can intuit when they’re being treated poorly even in the absence of words. The “Slight” is the only form of human communication of which I’ve ever been made aware that everyone can understand in grunts and moans, and even with a limited sense of vocabulary. Treating each other badly is a universal form of human interaction, after all.
We were miles and miles below the surface of the earth. Shadowy figures in muddy brown trench coats and million dollar cufflinks, in bright colors worn ironically, all with dour expressions and limited empathy — we were everywhere. We multiplied in the narrow beams of light that cascaded down from the pa
* * *
I was standing behind them, and they were standing still, both looking up at the point in a sky where a giant once stood.
He took a long drag from a short cigarette. He shrugged his shoulders and they slumped off the top of his arms and slid down his arms, down to his wrists, slid down, off of his body and onto the mud where they hissed and shriveled. His lungs pulsed and turned black.
He coughed lightly.
“Gone?”
The other one nodded.
“Collapsed.”
What had happened?
The Other One nodded distractedly at the destruction.
Metal wreckage gleamed in the fading sun. Sharp, brutal angles and harsh poetry; a broken promise in a heap of agony; a building that once stood erect and proud here had shriveled and receded, never again destined to stand for much of anything.
Not shriveled so much as failed; it lost a pointless war against gravity, entropy, and human ineptitude. In that sense, the fallen building felt a lot like every other war.
Same as it ever was…
I rolled my eyes and I asked if they could do separate checks.
The Other One shrugged its shoulders and I felt small, and a little chilly.
“It just stopped making sense, is all.”
What had happened?
“The building?”
They shrugged.
It never really made any sense, and then it just collapsed under the weight of its own impossibility.
“…really?”
The building had originally consisted of four sides. Two of the sides went outwards; one went upwards, three went downwards. It’s come to my attention that such a design does not make any sense. And without a foundation, without reason, nothing can stand.
Or so they tell me…
He scratched his head in a way that he hoped would make him look thoughtful. He felt a burn where his cigarette had so whittled away its time on this planet that the ember of what was once the spark of something evil, that spark that turned an object into a mechanism of slow motion suicide, was licking at his knuckles like a horny snake. His knuckles were thicker with hair per square centimeter than an African rainforest might be thick with foliage.
The Other One was jotting notes on a stubborn piece of 100% recycled paper chained by the ankle to a faded brown clipboard. They wore black suits with black ties and tired faces. Their hearts were the dashboards of old cars with the little Check Engine lights flashing that no one ever pays any attention to until after there’s been a terrible accident.
“Well dear, what then?”
She wrapped her tongue around her cigarette again and again in looping circles that didn’t make any sense. Her eyes sneered, “am I distracting you?” Even her symbolism was patronizing.
The fat one continued to eye the outer walls of the outdoor patio area distrustfully as they muttered, “yes, yes…so the building wasn’t real…is that it?”
What do you mean, “it.”
“Oh don’t be a jerk, you know what they mean!”
Do I, now…
The agent whose shoulders had melted away shook his head. He shook his head again. His head shook. He shook, his head twisting back and forth over and over at an accelerating pace, until the space where his head should have been was a vacuous blur, and the connection between his neck and his chest was a tiny strand of the wax they use to make Baby Bell Cheese wrappers, or a last wisp of silly putty being slowly pulled apart, and then it just
Meanwhile.
So what’s the damage?
Her eye sockets were two black pits teeming with snakes and sand worms; two shallow graves hastily repacked with dirt and scraps of dead body parts and kindling, and my bad behavior was flint scratching against a rusty nail.
I’m sure I said something stupid.
I’m sure the worst of me is worthy of the rage that judged a thousand ships.
The look on her face could have burnt Redwood Forest to the ground, and her lips were taught as a tightrope; horizontal hieroglyphics prophesying to any unfortunate passersby cursed to pay too much attention to such things that two stiff middle fingers will be saluting you upon your shipwrecked arrival at shore, where she’ll have been waiting dutifully for fucking ages for just such an opportunity so she could finally strut off to the last meager lifeboat waiting to usher her far away from the slow-motion catastrophe that is your entire life.
The restaurant was Italian, or something like it. All around us, extremely expensive wine glasses under-filled with overpriced wine were being clinked without enthusiasm or sincerity. The walls were decorated with the sorts of paintings that people don’t really buy for their own homes, nor spend much time paying any attention to while they dine, but insist on judging meticulously in the Decor section of Yelp reviews.
Decades-deep spouses and reanimated corpses, mired in quicksand and aggressively awkward indifference on the best of days, all pretending not to notice the deafening silence between courses, between years, between the unspoken mutual self-loathing that leaks out onto each other’s shoes every single day; between all the chickenshit decisions that had somehow catapulted two spoiled, entitled, disaffected youths all the way from rebellious indifference to heinously uninspired middle aged houseplants in what now felt like the blink of an eye.
I disagree with how best to micromanage our children.
I never really cared for golf, but I don’t know what else to do with my time other than drink.
I bitterly miss having friends, and I don’t really care for our acquaintances.
I blame you.
My eyes were sore from rolling out of their sockets. I up-chucked an overly theatrical grunt as I popped one of them back in.
“So.”
So what.
“So. The building burned.”
Well, it broke, I guess.
Something impossible simply cannot stand forever…
“And who’s to fix it?”
What?
“And who will have to pay for all of this?”
Outside, the sky was the color of an eclipse right before it burned your eyes out forever. Thunder rolled by with disinterest, like tumbleweed rolling through your standard American-made, brightly-painted suburban wasteland. It wasn’t raining, not really; it was just sort of, well, you know the sound — god dry-heaving a fatal mix of anger and rebellion about a thousand years too late for anyone but nerds to notice.
Only the non-believers ever really pray anymore.
I perused the bill. The numbers joined hands and formed a circle, and the circle was a mouth that curled into a disgusting, misshapen grin and it laughed at me, snickering and sneering like a middle school bully all hopped up on secondhand amphetamines and early-onset hopelessness.
Look, don’t get me wrong — for all my casual judgement of the stunted regulars lining the walls of this place, the most romantic aspect of any decent relationship is its mutual hatred. Nothing depresses me like old married couples too stupefied by their own boring lives to bother being upset about it anymore.
Cummon baby, hate something already.
Hatred takes care. Hatred is a feeling. And if you’re too stubborn or too naive to entirely give up on actually feeling alive again, you might as well start by feeling something, after all.
Oh yeah. That’s it baby, hate me. Hate me so hard it hurts. I want to bother you. I want to concern you. I want to be the toe you stubbed on your way to work. I want to be that distracted, far-away, vaguely undersatisfied look that reappears on your face without you even noticing anymore every single day while you wait for the subway during your morning commute. I want to be the pain-in-your-ass neighbor that you talk to your friends about. Oh yes. I want your mom to vaguely recognize my name from all the times you’ve bitched to her about that asshole you know that obstructs you from getting anything useful done during daylight hours because he’s just so fucking difficult.
I want your life to be something big, and noisy, and stupid and real, and in its context I want to take up space.
I want to burn my name on your wrist.
“Honey, please. You’re embarrassing me.”
I felt a chill run across my shoulders, and I pulled my knees into the warmth of my belly and I hissed.
“You’re causing a scene.”
I signed my name in looping circles on the long, thin, white piece of paper with soft blue lines on it. The circles looped over and over like a coiled snake. Like an impossible tongue. Like a mistake.
That’s it. Oh yeah, don’t stop. Embarrass me, baby…
[TITLE REDACTED FOR SECURITY PURPOSES.]
The thing that always gets me about old timey judges’ wigs, those physical manifestations of unsightly, conspicuous power, all eggshell white, like they’d been dutifully stitched together from the eraser shavings off the ass of a kidnapped cherub, is that I have absolutely no fucking idea at what moment in time and space throughout all of human history, if at all, they could ever have really been taken seriously.
Did an actual living person just think to themselves one day that, yes, I could wear a rejected carnival prop on my head while decreeing The Law of the Land and still be respected? Did they do it just to make that point, and to whom?
The thing that immediately stood out to me when I first appeared before the honorable Judge gnihtemoS was that his gut was so bulbous that it spilled over the Judge’s Bench, oozed like silly putty down to the ancient hardwood flooring of the courtroom and pooled in slow motion at the heel of the septuagenarian stenographer’s scuffed, matte black right dress shoe.
“…the sound of which will haunt the nightmares not just of those present, but of all decent people for all times — both the time of Man, and the messianic day.”
The battle cry of the mad is the gambit of the fool.
“Sorry…what?”
Judge gnihtemoS glared at me and roared; fire bellowed from his unhinged maw, which hung so low over His Esteemed Bench that it plopped with a muted thud into the raw pink fat of His Esteemed Gut.
The stenographer shifted her weight and tried to move her right foot but found that she couldn’t. She tried frantically to yank or to stomp her foot; desperately she sank herself deeper into her seat, and just as her heart was drowning in thick gooey dread she finally managed to thrash her foot free; but like a ghost’s hoof bucking wildly at molecules of oxygen and trying to split them in half, her foot made contact with what felt like nothing and she began to sweat.
Farther and farther away, her right foot sank down into the void, into the space of her car where the brake pedal should have been, and she realized in a dizzying rush of pure terror expertly cut with top-shelf adrenaline that the car would not slow down. Its MPH were creeping up past the century mark now and she screamed silently through a locked jaw. Her hands gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles were the color of the skin of dead ghosts. She slid her body further down her seat, down into the asphalt that sped by beneath her like satan’s treadmill in the space where her brake pedal should have been available to stomp on if she valued her life enough to slow things down a little. The road ahead of her was completely out of sight now as she sank lower and lower, and the sky above her seemed comparatively to move so slowly, even as the space beneath her hurried her back to oblivion.
She screamed, and it echoed between my ears and it faded.
I sat inside a circle of white chalk that was ten years, sorry, I meant to say it was ten yards wide in every direction from where I knelt, head bent, as a monsune tormented my naked flesh, belted my raw pink back, ripped the hair off my scalp, and made my t-shirt heavier than sin. I was sitting in the witness chair, completely drenched, acid rain pooling by my feet as it dripped off my clothing and my hair, and every distant family member whose name I couldn’t remember were all glaring at me, all sitting shoulder to sympathetic shoulder with my flabbergasted parents in a jury box surrounded by a cage that was topped off with state of the art, freshly spit-shined, American-made barbed wire glistening on High. All of them were clearly wondering what they could possibly have done to deserve my mistakes.
“You let it fall. You could have said anything. You could have done something. It wouldn’t even have stood if you hadn’t supported it from the base. That’s how these things work in principal. Someone has to be wrong. And who’s to say you’re right, other than you?”
I wanted to rip my stomach open on barbed wire attempting to scale the fences. I wanted to leave little bits of the skin that used to wrap my belly behind me to coat that razor sharp, American-made instrument of violent exclusion; I wanted to limp toward my parents, my gut mangled and bloody, my lungs desperate for oxygen, my eyes set to rage, their eyes frozen in horror, and I wanted to steal the car keys from my mom’s purse and make a frenzied, juvenile run for a non-extradition country, preferably a warm one. I wanted to choke Judge gnihtemoS until his eyeballs popped and I finally deserved the punishment he would undoubtedly wrap around my neck like a scarlet collar, but I didn’t really want to hurt anyone, and I certainly didn’t want them to watch. I wanted to grab a scalding ember with each hand from the fires of some third-rate knock-off of hell until salt-stained, 100% recycled shame-flavored water flowed down my cheeks like a monsune in a desperate, biological bid to atone for thinking the unforgivable thoughts to which I’ve just confessed; for feeling rotten.
Guilty.
The sound of a gavel, the sound of the hammer finally falling;
The sound of the silence of those you love slowly digesting the reality that they were wrong when they thought that they knew you, when they thought better of you, before they thought too hard about you at all beyond an abstract of potential based almost entirely on their entirely subjective priorities and experiences.
The sound of every decision you can’t have back, the tiny crack in your heart that every adult will atest never really heals…
…and finally the quiet sigh you suddenly exhaled one day as you sat down, and you weren’t sure why you did it at first, but now you do it every time you seat yourself; not because you’re physically tired, or because sitting down is particularly difficult yet, but because you give in, and it’s over, and you lost.
You’ve lost.
You’re lost.
You…lost….
The sound which will haunt the nightmares of all decent people for all time.
All rise, until the fall.
Guilty, one and all.
Boo hoo.
She laughed.
She laughed, but she wasn’t happy.
She laughed with her whole body, she quaked like a volcano; she cried with her eyes, the corners of which were a topographical map of all of human history, and she mocked me with her stare. She made my stomach feel like a merry-go-round filled with brunch-drunk soccer moms suffering from empty nest syndrome laughing angrily and drinking away their sudden lack of anything to micromanage.
She laughed to defend herself, or rather, to reassure herself regarding her position in the world, at least as it related to me.
She laughed until I burned.
“So you destroyed something…and now you feel bad about it. Join the club, man!” He smiled, and he winked, and he shook my shoulder with his hand good naturedly. He was the kind of guy that flirted by nature of being alive and it pissed me off, especially because it probably wasn’t his fault. I hated him for not giving me a reason to.
“Well then, are we offering notes?” inquired the fat one facetiously, “because I personally did not particularly care for the exquisite detail offered to some of the characters’ more…rotund physiques.”
For a moment outside of time we all were absent — a negative space, a skip in the record. A conspicuously normal black cat sat alone in a deserted seating area behind what was likely once a bar a very long time ago. The cat counted slowly down, in its head, from ten until one, and then it was gone, and then we were there, and all else had never been. None of us knew it at the time, or ever would again.
The Fat One shivered. The Handsome Man coughed lightly, and I rolled my eyes, but it felt forced, and I didn’t like the feeling — it was like when you laugh at your boss’ shit jokes. Come to think of it, it usually does these days…feel forced, I mean — acting like you don’t really care…
I’m not really sure how they were lighting the patio. Maybe there were rope lights, which would certainly not be out of place in a place like this, but I didn’t notice them strung anywhere.
The light was hitting us from The Right Side. It was off-yellow, and it felt stale and hollow, the way the sun must feel watching its fading power get unceremoniously repatriated in reruns by the sulking moon night after night.
The night air settled on my skin like a fly alighting on my forearm. I wouldn’t have felt it if I hadn’t noticed it sitting there, making itself at home on my skin, making me a setting rather than a character, an object rather than a living thing. A breeze rustled the space where my hair used to be longer, and I scratched away a bit of skin that died so long ago that I was a very different person when the skin on top of it had been scratched away by nails I’d shed many moons ago.
You don’t think about those things when they happen, of course — the hair you dispose of just before it stops growing back, the skin you bleed away that replaces itself for the rest of your own personal forever, just not quite in the place where it had been when you were younger; you just wake up one day and realize that you’d always noticed that you aren’t who you were, and a part of you has known for a very long time that it will never be as good again. Mirrors are the devil’s playthings, because they show you one of his greatest weapons: the truth; the truth of yourself, the truth of time and what it does to you.
Or maybe I’m just overthinking everything again. They tell me I tend to do that.
“I wasn’t going to say anything, love…”
And yet here we are all talking about it…
“Annnnywaaay…”
Anyway… I’m pretty sure that’s what I was thinking about while it was raining on me and a bunch of, well, for the sake of brevity let’s just call them friends, I guess. Because that’s what we do — we sit together behind a bar, drinking things that aren’t cool anymore to feel sensations that aren’t exciting anymore until we laugh in a way that means a lot less than it used to.
“You are such a downer. You know that, right?”
Then again, perhaps it wasn’t raining after all….
“…and we love you too. Dick.”
Shut…
“You’re our friend, and you always will be. No matter how hard you fight it. So get over it.”
All hail the distant prince and the forerunner and the chaos king of Dreamland; the hand without a trigger finger, the storm without an eye, the rage that never burns…
***
Sometimes I write letters to dead people asking them for recreational drug advice. My therapist asked me once upon a time why I hadn't just used email. I told her that I don't have a therapist. She nodded at that, but just before never having existed, she asked if the old “change the topic” maneuver ever successfully resolved all the questions I was ignoring that scream inside my head. I felt at that moment that answering a shadow would play a trifle gauche, so I just made a mental note to go fuck myself and moved on. That's all you can do when you won't do anything else, I suppose...
***
Prison. Solitary in short order. Days and nights bleeding together. A long train of thought at the speed of meaningless dreams. Lying in the darkness on a tiny cot half-covered with itchy used-to-be-white sheets, feeling as tired and as awake as I ever did during my (time / short stint) in something south of pervs’ purgatory with bad lighting and no fashion sense.
No sense at all, if you ask me, which of course they never will…
Talking to the ceiling now, watching little lines made of little tiny cracks move and pulse and expand into haunting hints of some peaceful danger far off in the distance. Fairytales and moon monsters and paradise, all living reasonably-amicably-if-not-peacefully between the ears, all sketched out in little black lines formed from the cracks in the ceiling.
Eyes closed. Eyes open. Painting a lonely little world on the ceiling with my flickering pupils — a town populated with people with whom I’d never associate; with the people that I can never seem to shake.
The glitterati of the emotionally destitute.
Go on — repeat the beginning, at least for a little.
The beginning, yes, get it right this time.
I remember well that it was evening when it all began.
Yes — it was evening, and it was a little chilly.
No, no it wasn’t chilly at all. But then again, it wasn’t really warm, either…
And then, again, perhaps it was…
Well, what what is then?
The evening? Well, as long as you’re asking. ..
The evening wasn’t cool.
Wasn’t warm.
Was precisely, almost conspicuously room temperature, if the room were outer space…
Editor’s note: DrWadata is a bad person, and not to be trusted. He claims to come and go from Dreamland to this very day, but I can’t shake this terrible feeling that it’s us that come and go while Dreamland never leaves. In either case, if you ever find yourself lost in Dreamland with nothing much better to do, I suppose if the good Doctor were here he’d suggest that you pull up a chair, order yourself a drink, and allow yourself the luxury of following along as the stories drift by like rain…
