Young Andy reported to my office at around 10:30 am, thirty minutes earlier than our agreed-upon meeting time, looking disheveled. Straw colored hair, a rats' nest; eyes bruised by bludgeoning insomnia.

"What the hell happened to you, kid?" I asked.

"Roused from peaceful sleep by a big-ass mynah bird," came his croaky reply. "Damn terror. I got the fears, man. Mind if I come in, or you gonna leave me dissociating on your front stoop?"

You're not dissociating if you're aware of it, I thought, but gestured for him to enter regardless. "Can I get you some coffee?" I asked.

"I can't deal with bitter right now, or the clean-cut sharp-sweet of sugarcane. If I'm gonna take a drink, it needs to be sickly-hazy sweet, fake sweet, saccharine syrup; the kind that fills your mouth with fruit gas. You know what I mean?"

"Sure I do, but I have a policy." If I'd had a sign by my desk to tap, I would have. Actually, that might be a useful investment. Save me plenty of breath. "No ethers, absinthe, dream-wine, or other street-names for the same—by which I mean the Lethe Syrup you're noodling at—before 11 AM."

"Aw, cut me some slack, Doc, like I said—"

"Big-ass mynah bird, right. The fears. You already told me. I can sympathize, but..." I trailed off. I could sympathize. You know that feeling when you fall out of bed and split your lip on the nightstand, and you look down at the cherry-colored flow (too tired to move) turning to rust before your very eyes ("like magic!") and you think oh God, can this night get any worse? Then you look over and see gray beginnings of dawn peeking through the blinds with the chirping of early birds (fat and happy on swollen nightcrawlers who pushed their sunrise luck) and you think, oh no, resign yourself to looking over at the alarm clock, and it screams out at you 5:30! 5:30! 5:30! in shrill blinks? Not a good feeling.

Which is why I was feeling generous towards Young Andy on this balmy April morning. "I'll cut you a deal," I said to him. "You tell me everything you dreamed—no pruning the finer Freudian details, they please my journal's periphery readers—and damn what the clock says, I'll let you have a whiff of anything I got. But then you've gotta wait to clean your consciousness till the clock clears my conscience. Deal?"

Young Andy just grunted, his eyes in a reptile glaze. He blinked, polished them, and I don't mean to brag but he starts going on about my poeticisms and how they make him feel so sunny and I swear it was like he was a needle-fanged vampire tucked into my veins. Because I don't remember a word of what he said, only the dizzy euphoria-sick sentiment of being seen.

See, I would have dealt in more Earthly and addictive substances than dreams, but I'm not predatory enough by nature, I don't think. I like to think of myself more like an ox-pecker, and my clients great stinking bug-ridden buffalo. I take their parasitically draining dreams down, press them into my notebook like flower petals; and publish the blood-grease spots for the general public to Rorschach whatever meaning they get from them. I, myself, find nourishing meaning in the act of cleaning. So you see I'm not really so bad, except for when I get to thinking about myself (Narcissus tumbling in an internal pool) and forget to listen to the people in front of me, like I was doing at that very moment.

"The form! Please? Doctor, please, can I have my intake form? You still—" he grasped at the air, for the spider-silk right word, the way mania will make you—"do those?"

Seeing him surrender like that made me sad. I handed the clipboard over my desk; Andy snatched it in slow motion. Fervently, shaking hands (quivering, I mean) and a firm grip, with all the speed of a tortoise (stumbling under observation? Suffering the centipede's dilemma). Kid really had the Fears.

Couple minutes later he'd filled out the form, as usual. Last name, first name. "Andy, Young". Messily scrawled. with no regard for the blanks—the lines. Plenty of other identifying information, too, which I'm not at liberty to share. You understand.

"So tell me about your dream," I said, again gesturing sweepingly behind myself.

"I was at the park. It was a warm day, and I was shivering. The ground was damp and steep, I was sitting—alone—on a hill overlooking a pond. Next to my dad. We were feeding the ducks bread. You ever feed bread to ducks?"

"Not in a while."

"It's not good for them, apparently. But my dad isn't the kind of guy to care about that. If he has an idea of an idealized day out, at the park feeding bread to the ducks, he's not going to let anything stop it from happening. So that's how it went. I was cold and shivering on this nice sunny day, next to my dad, completely alone, feeding bread to the ducks, killing them for the sake of not hurting his fragile feelings." Poor kid was spitting his words with all the pained angst of a sludge headache.

"The ducks had been clustering at the bottom of the hill for a while. There weren't many left in the pond, so the water was relatively still. My fingers were a little too numb to tear the bread and between that and the guilt I had left the bread to my dad and was just watching the still surface, like Narcissus, except I couldn't see my face, just my silhouette against the sky at the top of the hill.

All of a sudden there's this gliding ripple, cutting the surface like scissors across a sheet of wrapping paper; and it wasn't a duck. Whatever cut the water like that was under the surface, and ducks don't dive. I kept watching it, and eventually it caught my dad's attention too. He asked me what I thought it was; I don't remember what I said but I don't think it mattered to him. because he told me, "No, buddy, it's a muskrat." I remember those words. None of the rest of his rambling chatter; just the only time he stood up and looked down at me. Anyways—"

The whole time Andy had been telling me this story, I'd been scribbling like crazy, trying to note down his frantic and fearful words to pace with their oily quickness; it was at this point that it occurred to me he may have (consciously or no) filled in the blanks with details that more blatantly reflect his complexes as he saw them. Translating a dream to a story, one-to-one, is an inherently futile endeavor. The appeal of dreams is the ways in which they don't make sense as narratives, as chronologies, in the ways they repeat and fold in on themselves and the ways they resist the objective record. They're never so blatant as "my father was there"; it's always "this one golfer I saw on TV once (who may or may not look like the dreamer's father, or otherwise be associated with him) was sitting on a throne in a room of indeterminate size and looking down at me." Then perhaps some qualified professional with a dogmatic guide to divination-in-different words (by which I mean a psychoanalytical altar) can pull out a sweater-thread of meaning, pull down the curtain, and say, "I think this represents your trauma surrounding your father!"

At this blessed epiphany the patient leaps to his feet. "By Jove, I think you've solved it!" he exclaims, and skips out of the hypnotically dim office, coins raining from his pockets, to rejoin the world as a productive member of society. Doctor and patient never see each other again; the fog of brain fever lifts and never returns; all dreams are rainbow-sugar, feathers tickling pleasure centers, immediately forgotten upon waking.

Of course I am no qualified professional. I'm just someone who can't sleep at night, and sells waking dreams to compensate. I guess Morpheus always collects his debts, in time or labor.

I hadn't even been listening to Andy this whole time. Just reflexively transcribing his waffling story he sold me as "phantasmagoria" until I couldn't even pretend to listen anymore. It was 11:15 when I sent him on his way with a whiff of rotten wormwood (Devil's Pressure, from a green bottle). If he'd just waited half an hour, Andy could have had his coveted sip; but I doubt that was what he was actually after.

I glanced down at my notes.

It turns out the slicing ripple was the work of a nutria. You know what a nutria is? It's this silky-furred kind of water rat, kind of like a beaver with a thinner tail. They originally hail from South America, but they flourish most in the southern United States where they were accidentally introduced. As a result, they're considered a pest species, shot on sight, hides left to collect dried blood and the juice by-product of rot.

The irony is that they were only introduced to their invasive range as a result of their pelts being valuable, once.

My notes ended there, and I didn't need any license to determine what Young Andy was trying to say to me. But for some reason I found his cry for help more insufferable than genuinely pathetic; so I wrote:

Patient desperately seeks a clearer form of abuse than the hazy chill his father provided. My professional opinion is that he ought to be institutionalized for his own safety. The world is full of predatory Sphinx-sharks ready to claw the eyes from his Oedipal niche.

All in a day's work, and I didn't even have to waste any ether on him. I fed my professional recommendation into a slot in my desk, where it would be shredded, the scraps would be incinerated, and the ashes would be fed to a great beastly beetle named Gregor who lived in the basement. Though, despite the underlying pipes and tubes and furnaces that facilitated this modern miracle, I felt completely alone.

Until there came a knock at the door.