I am no one you would want to know. You would call me a parasite, being unemployed and subsisting entirely on government assistance. I would say fuck you, you can afford to pay for my meager existence. You have your piece of the pie; don’t you dare begrudge me the crumbs. Leave me to my tiny Section 8 apartment and provide my paltry food stamps each month, and I will keep out of your sight. I take my tithe so that you need never see me.

It’s like going to sleep. You lay down and relax, and you drift into that dizzy, half-awake state where your body flips lazily in the thick water of dreams, only instead of falling asleep, you wake up, but it’s not your own body you wake up in. It’s nauseating, like being suddenly woken by a loud noise or a jolting nightmare, only the churning is worse, and the fear is different, when it’s felt in an unfamiliar frame. But at least- if you know what you’re doing, that is- you know what has occurred and where you have landed, and the fear is simpler; that of change, rather than that of surprise.

And then you acclimate yourself to being inside a stranger, and so the waking dream, the dream made flesh, har har, begins.