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a dream—it joins with sleeping minds, granting such souls
passage into its secreted spaces. And still it is not a dream
for true—it holds the potential to be much more, something
else entirely. You see, the thing starts out quite empty, just
the potential for a dream, but as it blends with a sleeping
mind, it begins to fill up, taking the shape of its contents. Yet
even these attributes wouldn’t visibly set it apart from any
garden-variety dream. No, it’s magic rests with the thing’s
ability to grow beyond sleep, to master the inferior world of
waking. Further texturing its composition is that it is highly
selective, choosing only the ripest, reddest dreams—those
whose bloody vision might be sufficient to fuel its capacity
to overcome reality.
“It is this last point that explains why the monstrous
dreamers had been assembled—to claim the honor of
embodying the Red Dream.
But this also reveals the cruelty of the thing, for the
dream is not fitted to merely a single dreamer, but to many—
monsters all dreaming the same dream. And it is through
that red facility the dreamers will come to know one another,
find one another, and finally, kill one another.
“However, on the last occasion I visited the dream, all was
not quiet but for the baying of dead beasts. The nightmare
was filling up with the voices of fresh wolves, growing hot
with hunger and blood. These new creatures began falling
upon one another, rending flesh from bone, and the dream
had been removed from the depths of forgotten silence, lifted
into red pools of terrible sleep. As I departed, familiar eyes
watched me go, something whose age was nearly as deep
as the pit itself. When its sight had fallen entirely upon me,
I felt my dream-self nearly explode from the heat. I awoke
that night to blankets of fire.”
The man threw his gaze at a hump of burned sheets piled
crudely in one corner of the shabby room. “But before
I awoke, I caught a passing glance at the thing that could

74 | Mark Anzalone