Excerpt
Some minutes later, Cley started moaning and tossing his head, as he often had done in his restless sleep of the past few nights. Mary remained utterly still, seeming to lie very lightly on her gossamer bedding in the diaphanous windsilken robe. I sat entranced by the two reclining figures in the flickering bluish candlelight. Smoke spiraled from the censers as silence filled the room, broken only by Cley’s muted moans and Mary’s measured breathing. A strange feeling of unreality began to suffuse my senses. For a moment it looked to me as if Mary were floating above the floor. The periphery of my vision began to bend in peculiarly. I thought I could sense movement just beyond the edge of my perception. The dim light in the room began to take on a shimmering quality. And then, for a mere instant, I had a clear vision of Cley. He was running, running through a dark and desolate landscape, running from a thing of terror. And my vision spun and dissolved into the thin curls of smoke trailing from the incense burners. Cley still slept fitfully on the bed, and Mary no longer seemed to float through the air, but lay still as death, her arms along her sides, the palms of her hands up, fingers slightly curled.

The room was filled with a more than normal reality, pregnant with the substance Mary had called dreamessence. The objects in the room seemed to hold a secret meaning of their own, a new significance, as if each thing had a use elsewhere, a hidden history of transubstance, a basic need I could never be aware of. I looked down at my hands. Were they my hands? They were new hands, meant for grasping things undreamt before, meant for reaching out, for touching and holding and knowing. I felt they could touch the invisible, touch it and form it into a thing of power and beauty. Sitting in the candlelight, unaware of any passage of time, I floated into enchantment as the two dreamers lifted my spirit singing to the very borders of their misty realm.