Fourteen-thousand miles due south of the Petiligatic Mot Clouds, right past the famous organic rings of Galstaig, nestled between the great corona of Gutgud – a red giant so formidable it turned neighboring giants a pale green – and a Shoemaker Space Station, is a man being sold a dream. It was an ordinary man being sold an extraordinary dream, a dream about cattle that roamed the fourteen major nebulas in the morning and then cozied up under the shadow of an asteroid, about yodeling in acoustic geometries that became the seed of a lifeform made completely on the plane of soundwaves – they proliferated, preyed, and pontificated their way to embody-less intelligence inside machines made of vibraphones – about dying through five blackholes, one per appendage, and such that the heart pinned in the space between like a lapel on the shirt of a spotted butler; about a man who falls astoundingly deep in love with the bacteria in his body, writes his entire lifesavings to the microbes when he dies, only to be betrayed in death by their fleeing to knew warm bodies; about a dreamer who pondered the authenticity of her dreams and so embarked on creating a device that documented every event in her dreams on parchment, until one day she dreamed of inventing a machine that built devices that made dream documenters and she was thrown to the winds of recursion. It was a dream that promised beyond what a standard person could ever hope to dream. Dreams like this only came on rare nights of profound revelation to great minds who had toiled at the core questions of the universe. Dreams like these cost the dreamer a lifetime of self-flagellation of the mind. Dreams like these cost lots, couldn’t be weighed in gold. The dream vendor was selling the dream for ten-cents.

The man being sold the dream is wearing onion skins for clothing and holds his teeth in place with a grimace, in fear the calcium caterpillars will have finished up all the roots already. JikJak is his chosen brand of perfume, which blends the scent of space grovel with the unpleasant sting of breaking your back on an asteroid beet farm for twenty years. A treble was written into the background hubbub by the man’s drumming fingers. He never had heard music in his life but that didn’t account for the rhythmic properties of the decaying nerves in his hands. The beet shovel is the poor man’s whiskey, so they say. Again the dream vendor parses through the storm of shame the man is emitting and presses into his hypothalamus the reasonable price he is offering for the extraordinary dream. He has seen them before, a man in disrepair such as this soul will have never been exposed to the diversity of sensory existence to be able to spit out more than a four-faced rock in his sleep. Even three-dimensional perceptions was only asking for brain strain on the order of a bird deciding to pop its waste. These poor sludge-heads had it rough, but the dream vendor liked their custom. They made him easy money, shifted stock he couldn’t shift.

How do you detect a counterfeit dream – a dream gushing with colors pulled from between electron levels and spun into magnificent bodies of ribbon that dance their haunches across a ballroom of glass like a nineteen-legged jerrybear on the precipice of self-actualization. The dream detective would provide you with a clever handbook that can instruct you on what to look out for in a dream, properties of which, if missing, would mean this dream is likely a fraud. The handbook is called The Synthetic Houmunculus Handbook Hunter, or The Shhh, for short. For example, human dreams are always divisible by three. Each transaction, translation, tribulation, or trait comes from three and doubles or trebles or quadrebles on from there. A leopard with five-hundred and two spots? Fake! Twelve trees in a cove with a thirteenth sapling beginning to sprout? Undeniable synthesis! Octopus cannot be dreamed for the great sapien of the sea bears eight arms, not nine, unlike the enneapus. Any healthy childhood will result in exposure through tales and class studies making sure children are taught the tenants of The Shhh. Beet-shoveling sludge-heads that whiff of JikJak don’t hear tales and study in class when they are young. They don’t know what to look for in a false dream or what to look for in a real dream. Seaweed battered by a ferocious muddy river is as close a correct description of how these souls get treated by their dreams, driven to seek pleasure in whatever might unclog their adrenaline pipes, driven to ride off planet at the sound of a nearby dream vendor chanting.

Frunk woke up with a start, looked at the clock on the wall, and let the pangs of regret and loneliness swell on the surface of his skin. The dream vendor was already removing his harness and unplugging the earworms. Three seconds of his head filled with the sound of a candle being pulled through a syringe and the worms were out. He tried to remember his dreams, dream vendors were picky about customers not using their HUDs while in the dream room so that they didn’t jot anything down from the dream. Policing dream pirating in the industry of the human mind wasn’t worth their time, so they worked to at least make it difficult. Funk was already losing the core thread of his dream. The organic rings of that gas planet that swam like fireflies, the a girl who built a dream device in a dream that had a smile – he liked that smile; smells too, like the charred scent of moon rock rubbed by hot meteorite, or that overpowering stench of beets. The dream vendor was pestering him to move on, the next customer was at the door with an armful of dream cartridges. He imagined affording that many dreams one day. Then he remembered one of the last things in his dream, it was about a book that all these children were reading, that he felt he should also read, but whenever he ran towards the book it grew two huge legs and leaped off the planet to one that was too far to get to. The title hung on the tip of his tongue, and then fell into his mind and he suddenly remember the name, unconsciously yelling an “aha!” into the room. The dream vendor scowled at him and returned a “shhhh!” and that was enough to knock the thought off Frunk’s thought trapeze and into the pit of lost dreams forever.