A dream journal is a dangerous artifact for an oneironaut to create. Writing memories down makes them real. It gives them history. It binds them to you, and shaking the hooks and barbs of such creation can be the work of a lifetime.

You do not understand the peril of this work. You still wonder if this is anything more than a collection of deranged ruminations. You wonder if this is the vomitous agglutination of a lunatic, an aberrant flow of text that is disassociated from consensual reality. There is no meaning here, that is your concern.

My fear is that there is too much. In transcribing my dreams, I may be committing an infectious sin; I may be guilty of arranging words and phrases in a way that will disturb your own dreaming.

An illuminated psychiatrist (an oneirologist who has not yet strayed across that line and become an experimental explorer, who has not yet become an aquanaut on the hypnagogic seas) never asks his patients to write their dreams down; the psychiatrist simply listens to the patients' recollections of the dreams and offers interpretations. The psychiatrist understands the warped language of Dream and acts as guide and shepherd but never allows fantasy a purchase into the real through the spaces of text. The patients' recollections are already diffuse enough to be passive; there are no active infections in storytelling. But when the words are written down, they gain . . .

Look at the Christian God. He has been bound by his text. We haunt Him through His literature, even after everything He's done to push us away. There is history now between Him and you and me, and that is why We cannot be separated.

The job of the oneironaut is dangerous because he journeys to the source of the disease, into the very Godhead, where he creates new pathways on a symbolic and pre-textual level. He is a creator, but not The Creator. There are some of us who believe these our acts are the sword strokes of angelic liberation. They count themselves as part of the host beside Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, and the others. Unlike some of my egomaniacal peers, I know my efforts are clumsy and crude beside the Creative Spark that allows us to dream. I—to persist in the Christianized metaphor—am like the serpent, and I must be made welcome in order to do my work.

But what if the patient's permission is neither sought nor required? I am not so naïve as to believe that oneiric surgery cannot be accomplished against the conscious will of the patient. The unconscious mind fights the intrusion that it doesn't welcome, but that certainly doesn't mean that such work isn't possible. And, if such work—ah, call it what it is: such mental rape—is done covertly, then does it not follow that it could be done without the conscious awareness of the patient?

Can you imagine? Sudden voids in your head with no warning or reason. One instant, you remember the face of your first love—you remember her touch, her kiss, her scent—and then, even as you cherish that memory, it is gone. And not gone in that "where did I put the car keys?" sort of way. Gone so completely that it never existed. All that is left is that blank confusion; part déjà  vu, part symbolic resonance, part instinctual reaction, it is an emptiness of mind that your unconscious quickly fills before it spreads.

If you can be edited thus, is it not possible that life could be constructed as well? Could memory be inserted, and would the patient ever realize such fabrication had occurred if the surgery was precise enough?

I remember the first sticky night of my tumescent growth into manhood. I remember the first blowjob I ever received; the clumsy furtiveness of her mouth on my cock and that floating sensation when I finally came.

So why do I remember my first menstruation as well? Barbed wire knotting in my lower stomach. The involuntary quiver in my right thigh. The sudden warmth of blood, and the chest-tightening panic that it won't ever stop flowing. Yes, I remember all of this too.

There. I have written it down. The memory has weight and presence; I have given it life by defining it with language. And if I have been edited, then I have strengthened their effort.