there are at least ten of us in this second-floor hotel room - people take turns speaking, reciting poems, accompanied by dramatic shifts in lighting - as part of their performance some of the speakers summon holographic images from their fingertips - I begin to reflect on how rare this type of gathering is among my clock-punching world, although in the dream I seem to have very little idea of who I am or exactly where this hotel is situated - a tall woman makes her way across the room at sits on the floor next to me - she carries herself with an aristocratic poise - her name is Hekat, though she does not tell me this, I just seem to know, just as I seem to know the names of nearly everyone in the room – it’s as if they all had strongly spoken psychic nametags –

Hekat has a sun-baked and wart-studded face, thick leathery skin deep with wrinkles – she is not pretty but she is beautiful – her limbs are long and rugged – she whispers into my ear as not to disturb the current performance, saying she owns a publishing house, Hekat publishing, and she would like to publish one of my pieces – ask her which piece; she says, “The Junk-Bond Artist,“ which in my waking life is no such piece, though in the dream it is a work I'd almost finished – I try to tell her that “The Junk-Bond Artist” is very new, and though a rough bootleg copy might have fallen into her hands, the closest thing I have to a finished version is a spoken recording, a tape I'd made last night – I try to tell her this, but I stutter and swallow my words – my tongue is heavy and clumsy in her presence; she is possessed of a goddess-like aplomb that makes me seem nervous and shifty by comparison – she seems to suspect that I was planning to go with another publisher, but eventually, in broken English, I get the message across –

the next thing I remember is being surrounded by a new set of strangers in a low-lit basement, who, apparently, are listening to a bootleg copy of the tape – the voice is tremulous and whiny, like a man speaking while weeping, and though I recognize the spoken words as my own, there is a grain of in-authenticity to the recording, as if it were being played on a turntable at the wrong speed - the speaker hiccups and swallows audibly into the microphone, and is evidently very drunk, slurring, lisping, randomly slowing down or stopping, losing the pace of the story - some of the words are incoherent, which pains me because this is the original composition on the tape; there is no written version to refer back to – in between the strained lines, I hear one of the strangers say, “it sounds like somebody’s trying to play ‘writer' - ”

the dream segues into a low-budget punk rock festival out in Olney farmland – the stage is set up between two barns - I watch the opening band’s first few songs and try to let go and enjoy myself, but I can’t get into it – as I walk toward the highway, I notice that the stage is sinking into the river; half of the band members are knee-deep in water –

suddenly I am at a party in the Uniontown neighborhood of Astoria, directly under the Megler bridge – Hekat is there, along with another host of new strangers, many of whom are pale, waifish nymph-like girls – they seem to float rather than walk – they wear flowing ostentatious gowns, or are in various stages of undress, or nude – their bodies are creamy and hairless; their skin seems to glow – the blonde fairy-girl who seems to be the chief among them offers me an array of tiny white pills labeled with illegible etching – she identifies them as essence of a certain flower root, though the name soon slips my mind, and when I ask her to repeat, I am certain she tells me something different – I ask if it is a hallucinogen – she replies that it is a tranquilizer dispensed in such exact intervals of dosage as to produce hallucinogenic effects - several times I ask again the name of the flower, and several times she gives me a different answer – at her suggestion, I take the lowest dosage, 38 milligrams – I mingle about the party and slowly begin to get high – the sensation is not unlike the initial onset of hallucinogenic mushrooms after having swallowed a few valium –

I soon find myself in a dimly lit slate-floored washroom with marble countertops – though I don’t feel inebriated by the drug, I have lost my clothes and I am crouched naked beside a basin, before a mirror – my eyes are narrow slits – I hear the nigh melodious voices of two or three of the fairy-girls, and I slide off the counter onto the floor – the drug seems to have liquefied my bones – the chief fairy says, “you don’t have to hide yourself from me - ” I slither around a corner and see the blonde chief fairy and one of her friends in bridal gowns floating under a shower of warm water - again I ask her the name of the flower root essence she’s given me and wonder aloud how a stronger dose would’ve felt – the fairy floats toward me, extending her hand across a wooden table – in her hand are four tightly closed white lily blossoms – she instructs me to eat them – the petals are dry and crumbly; they have no flavor –

suddenly I am back amid the strange party crowd, fully clothed and seemingly in charge of my faculties – Hekat and I agree that we should “go out,” if not to some scruffy bar then simply for a walk – soon, the entire party forms a committee on the stairs leading up to the front porch – people are pointing at graphs and calendars, an itinerary for our 'evening on the town' is being hammered out – I want no part of it – I suggest to Hekat that we leave them to their devices and split off from the group – a rancor of protests passes through the people on the stairs – I watch them from behind a rusty screen door –

Hekat and I walk halfway down the stairs, then jump off into a small boat that is floating in a canal that runs under the staircase and westward toward Young’s Bay – the boat speeds off and a wave of relief passes over me – I soon become aware that I am no longer in a boat with Hekat but with a series of vague personages that gradually oozes into and out of form; I am never alone with any one individual, but with the transitional phase between the last person and the next – they speak of mundane things, of lunch menus and lug-nuts and passports and oil-cans as the boat passes through mud ravines and sloughs –

soon, the presence dissolves and I am alone in the boat, speeding through an unfamiliar swamp wilderness – tall trees grow out of the slimy bank, flanked by tall reeds – the trees sprout heads and torsos of flushed, babbling idiots with red-burning menacing eyes – the tree trunks split into amazingly long insect-legs, the branches form into multi-jointed arms – the stilt-like tree-morons are closing in on me, shrieking and biting the air as I plow through the green weeds on the surface of the water – I look back, horrified, as they begin chasing me… and I wake up