[Dr. Jeffrey Weisz of the Destiny City Harmony & Wellness Clinic, affiliated with Destiny City Memorial Hospital, does not record his sessions with patients or create written transcripts of said sessions. If he did, however, one of them might look like this.]

DR. WEISZ: Hi there! Sorry you had to wait; I was just seeing one of my other patients out. [rustling of papers]

PATIENT: Hey, what's the haps, Doc.

DR. WEISZ: Not much, not much. [more rustling] You're -- Raymond Gordon?

PATIENT: The very same.

DR. WEISZ: You mind if I call you Ray?

PATIENT: No! Only bloodchildren may use the soulname!

[silence]

PATIENT: Have you ever actually met a Raymond who didn't want to be called Ray? Of course you can call me Ray. [laughs] No worries, Doc. Lighten up. I'm not busting out the crazy so early in our relationship. You haven't even taken me out to dinner yet. Do I look like that kind of girl?

[PATIENT is a Caucasian man in his late twenties, handsome, has the look of someone who ought to tap-dance with a cane and a hat or croon into an old-style micropohone: blue-eyed, brunette, about 5'11"-6'. He's wearing a maroon V-necked sweater and dark blue jeans, and black lace-up Converses under those. He has glasses -- ovular lenses, no frames, nothing too hipster. His watch is cheap, but new.]

DR. WEISZ: [laughs, a little uncomfortably] All right then. Let's see, Ray -- the records I've got here indicate that up till a few years ago, you were working with Dr. Kawabata over at Destiny City Memorial Psychological and Psychiatric, is that right?

PATIENT: Yup.

DR. WEISZ: Any particular reason the two of you stopped working together, if I can ask?

PATIENT: Eh. [yawns] Wasn't feelin' it any more.

DR. WEISZ: Okay... You didn't think you needed to see her any more, you mean?

PATIENT: Something like that, yeah.

DR. WEISZ: Any reason you didn't go back to her after you decided that you wanted to speak with someone again?

PATIENT: Difference of opinion. Tragic.

DR. WEISZ: On?

PATIENT: The Cubs. Turns out she's a White Soxer.

DR. WEISZ: [brief silence] All right. [more silence] So, do you mind if we talk a little about why you're here today?

[excised]

PATIENT: But mostly I'm here about these nightmares I've been having. I'm not looking for you to prescribe me a magical Nightmare-B-Gone pill or anything, Doc, you've got to understand. It's just that I don't keep a diary, I don't really want to trouble my girlfriend with this and I -- haven't really got any other friends I talk to about this stuff. Not saying I haven't got 'em, just saying that, you know, that whole 'so I've been having these horrible dreams bloo bloo bloo' conversation would be a mite awkward, you know what I'm saying? So I just figured I'd get it off my chest, you know? And hey, tax dollars are paying for me to get this off my chest here. [pause] I do love me some tax dollars.

DR. WEISZ: Nightmares?

PATIENT: Right here in River City.

DR. WEISZ: Do you... mind explaining a little further?

PATIENT: [long pause, deep breath; when he speaks again, it appears an entirely different mood and manner of speech has overtaken him] We all have dreams, of course -- I've always been a vivid dreamer, although I don't often remember them past five minutes after I wake up. Which is aggravating, let me tell you. But I do know, in a lifetime of dreaming, that I rarely have nightmares -- not that dreams are so easily classifiable into "dreams" and "nightmares," of course, I'm pretty sure all dreams have a bit of the unheimlich to them. And I know I rarely have dreams that repeat at all. But of late I've been having a dream that repeats in different iterations, and I can safely classify it as a nightmare, whatever that really means.

[silence]

DR. WEISZ: Go on?

[silence]

PATIENT: I dream I'm standing in a desert, full of white sand. Warm white sand, hot in fact. It would burn my feet, but that's all right, they're always wrapped up. There's nothing for miles in sight. I suppose there's a bit of Freud's uncanny in that, if you think about it: waking up in an empty world, isn't that a little Twilight Zone? Creepy is the unknown and the corrupted familiar. This was sheer unknown. Anyway. So I'm in this desert, and I know there's no one else around, and I keep turning around looking -- the sun's hot, very hot -- and when I turn around again there's this set of ruins, think the Kings of Gondor along the River Anduin. So I walk that way.

It takes forever for me to walk, and I get impatient, really impatient, damn near angry, because I know I'm faster than this. Should be faster than this. But it takes damn near forever, and then once I'm here I find it's just a bunch of crumbled statues -- and a bonfire in the center, and a mirror on the other side.

And the bonfire's hot, so hot I can't even stand it, out here in the desert sun, so I walk a wide berth around it, it still takes me longer than it should, to look at the mirror. But the mirror's really close to the fire, and facing it; I have to stand between the mirror and the fire to look at myself.

So I do. It's agony.

But worse is my reflection: because in the mirror, I've got a crack running from here -- [presumably indicates somewhere on his head] -- all the way down my cheekbone, down my neck, down under my shirt. One big crack down half of me, like I'm made of terracotta. And when I touch it, like this, to see if it's on me as well as in the mirror, I see it crack and splinter into a thousand tiny little spider-cracks on my face, over my eye, all the way down my neck. I'm starting to shed clouds. I'm starting to shed sand. There's sand coming from all the cracks.

So I'm panicking, I don't know what to do, half of me is crumbling into sand, but then it occurs to me -- it always occurs to me -- am I clay? I'm standing next to this fire. The fire will seal me back up. I'm sure of it. I know it. And I know it's going to hurt, too, but it's what I have to do.

So I step in. And it hurts, oh, it hurts. But I realize I've gotten something wrong: because the rest of me is crumbling into sand now with it.

[silence]

PATIENT: I think that's where it ends. It would be pretty hard to live out the rest of a dream as sand.

DR. WEISZ: [pause] That sounds like a disturbing dream, Ray.

PATIENT: It is. I hope you write it down.

[excised]

DR. WEISZ: Have any particularly -- striking or upsetting changes come about in your life recently? That you can think of?

PATIENT: [chair creaks as he leans back, thinking] Hmm. [brief silence] No, not really.

[end of transcript]