Spotting The Unformed

Picture, if you can, Mister Salty. The one-time eponymous mascot of a Nabisco pretzel line. Now imagine if instead of dough and salt he were made of memory foam and flat, white vinyl. His head, instead of round, is more like the sticks of his arms, torso, and legs.

Imagine that whenever you turn your head to the right, you catch just the barest glimpse of this figure as it pulls its head back behind a curtain. This happens two or three times, until you decide to fake it out.

You look to your right and then quickly to your left, because you can tell, you can feel, that it’s there. Right beside you.

It is. You grab it by the shoulders and shake it. You wrap a hand around its faceless head and tighten, over and over.

In the moment you turned to catch it, you understood: it was an Unformed Dream Person that had not yet taken on a role or character in this dream you’ve been having that’s actually been a number of different dreams serially connected over the course of the night.

At that moment, you wake, still certain that this is how dreams work: these unformed forms become for you the people in your dreams. You’re not supposed to have seen one as they are, let alone remembered it when you woke.

Now you have to live with the idea, too. It’s nonsense, of course, but I was never going to become settled again if I didn’t spread the unsettlement.

Or, maybe that’s how they manage their travel from dreamer to dreamer.