Munmun(3)

I mean forexample you could make a pool out of cloud, or mountains of teeth. You could lift an orchard of roiling boiling rivertrees out of the dirt, trunking and churning and branching. You could make accordion palaces, whale buses, glinty trains of fourwheel ants scurrying up vines of road. Give hindlegs to stoves, puppyears to the sun. Wear skirts of fishflocks flashing like leaves, make a room in a big cat’s heart. You could give a whole suburb a ceiling of sea, you could dive into it from the rooftops, peek down at the seafloor and it’s a nightsky foaming with stars.

By you I mostly mean me, the only dreamer anymore who really plays Make Stuff Out Of Other Stuff, but maybe you could do it too.

Anyway that’s all great and nice if that’s what you want to put in the minds of the people traveling through your dreamzone. But if you’re sad, mad, frustrated and furious, you can also make traps and dungeons. Skyless shitscapes and gutterzones mazing under the skin of the world. Buzzing burning dust, stinking poison dew, air clotted up with mean little suns. Fake light so dull and blank it dries your heart. Rooms that crumple on you like bags, weapons to keep you from dying, a place where every escape is to somewhere worse.

You can make that too if you’re sad and mad and want to trick middleriches into a bad dream. But look, let’s say it works and a few of them end up there for a night, it’s still no good. It doesn’t really hurt them, because you can’t actually get hurt in Dreamworld. And in the morning the middleriches you tricked wake up in Lifeanddeathworld with all these new ideas of mean things they can do, and terrible things they might have the scale to make, in the world of your life where you can actually bleed and starve and die, also the world holding your delicat brain.

A few nights before it was time to leave, Prayer caught me gutterbuilding, I’d been doing it kind of a lot.

“Warner, don’t make that sad crap,” she told me. “Make the nice dreamzones instead.”

“I’m too mad,” I said, and dreamed a swarm of flying spiders right into the middle of a conversation of softskinned jerks, who ofcourse began freaking out.

“Gross,” she said. “Stop.”

“No,” I said, and whipped them up into a whole cyclone of fluttering sputtering spiders and it was sort of fun to watch the jerks scramble around, try to dream them away and can’t, toobad, jerks.

“Okay, look,” said Prayer. “Don’t get a big head. But you make very strong dreamstuff, pretty great when you want it to be.”

“Can’t argue with that, I guess,” I admitted.

“Okay, shut up and just listen,” she said. “My point is, most of us can’t even make anything half the time and all we can do is tumble and drift through other people’s foggy halfmade random crap. So don’t be a peen and please just make some nice dreamstuff for the rest of us, okay, I’m asleep and I need to relax.”

So I dreamed the spiders into soothing glimmery glass jellyfish, swaying in the air all gentle and liquidy. But if you’re mad or sad it’s really hard to dream nice stuff without poisoning it in some way. So their glassy pearlstrings did from timetotime keep casually settling around a jerk’s neck and arms and kind of strangling him a little bit.

The biggerricher you are, usually the less you like Dreamworld. Because in Lifeanddeathworld you feel completely superior to littlepoors, but in Dreamworld some of them might be stronger at dreaming than you. And additionally just in general you can’t completely avoid talking to poors, hearing about their sufferings, getting reminders of hey, if you were born littler your life would be definitely notasgood, and ofcourse feeling guilt about breaking their houses or dumping garbage on them or killing them some of the time.

But riches mostly don’t remember their dreams so good either, so sad or bad dreaming doesn’t bother them as much as maybe it could.

Sometimes I let myself tumble and drift like everyone else and get a good look at other people’s dreamstuff and for the most part it was like Prayer said. No one’s stuff was as good as mine. I mean sometimes I’d see something new that gave me an idea or something I could improve upon or whatever. But mostly it was traveling through weedy dry dreamzones with nothing good growing out.

I did once find someone as good as me, honestly probably better if you need to compare. I was above a little parky forest and right as I got the twitchy feeling I wasn’t alone, the treetops breathed a cloud of seedfluff. And the seedfluff twinkled into flowerheads, and the flowerheads sprouted into birds, and the birds drew a floating house with a thousand doors, and I began to hear a quiet hum but not through my ears, instead through my whole body so it felt like the murmur of something huge and faraway.

I opened a door and fell down in the sky because out poured a voice like the richest drink. A voice with twenty thick dizzy flavors in it, singing a song of notes made out of notes made out of notes. I couldn’t even move. Then I could move and I opened another door and another voice glided out and wrapped the first with fluttering ribbons of itself. And again I couldn’t move, until I could, and I opened door after door and the voices all twined each other and cascaded in every direction, inward outward forward backward in and out of time, and the song grew huge and bathed me and my skin went liquid and my bones glowed.

I was weeping with happiness, also full of a sad ache. I was sad because I knew I would probably only get to hear it once and then lose it forever. And the song was so far beyond what I could dream, I wouldn’t even be able to remember it.