Sample The First Two Chapters of ‘Some Advanced Notes on Practical Dreaming’ (September 2025)
Trigger Warnings
The following sample contains content that some readers may find upsetting. Please continue at your own discretion and make the decision that prioritises your wellbeing at this time. Trigger warnings for the following pages for;'
Suicidal ideation (vaguely implied)
Body horror
Parasites (vaguely implied)
1.
‘Of all the world’s institutions for ephemeral study, Auchter House is not the oldest, the youngest, the most remote or even picturesque. It remains, however, the most distinguished, the most written on and - as any casual observer will know - the most secretive by far.’ - Amadeus Danes, from ‘A History of Ephemeral Understanding’ (1987).
The white nights have not yet left the Highlands. Eleven PM and the end-of-summer-sky is still pale and blazing. But inside the house on the hill, everything is deepest dark.
The windows are mullioned, the glass old enough now to be almost useless. The walls are stone and an arm’s length thick. Carpets pile the long corridors, the endless stairs. Everything is dusty and cold and nearly silent. The girl with the red hair and the red jumper and the red right at the corner of her eyes is almost invisible as she takes the main stairs two, sometimes three, at a time.
Woman, one should say. Sam is twenty three now, coming up on twenty four. But there is something to her slightly awkward gait, the occasional twitch of her hands or the corner of her mouth which gives the impression of one still finding their feet. And badly. Great noblemen once climbed those stairs and the brightest minds of countless generations and yet when Sam reaches the top she trips over a loose piece of flooring and crumples to the floor. She swears when she rights herself again, and this at last is prodigious and creative.
She looks immediately around, the rising panic inside her chest that was already so suffocating and unbearable only intensifying at the thought of disturbing anyone behind the first door directly to her right. But when she opens it the sleepers are still quiet, four of them on the floor and at odd angles, the last hunched over in a wicker chair.
The room is lit only by a salt lamp; a soft square of orange-pink light which frames perfectly the only person in there, save Sam, still conscious. She has terrible brown bangs and white setting powder stuck like powdered sugar in a faint line across her pink-lipsticked mouth. A gaudy broach shaped like a grasshopper or a mantis, something mandibular, is struck through her black blouse and when she looks upwards with her taut, thin eyebrows pressed close together Sam dives immediately into imagining exactly who she would have to become to never be looked at that way again.
‘You’re late,’ the woman says. She makes no effort to lower her voice for the benefit of the sleeping bodies around her. She sits in their exact center so that they surround her like the spokes of a wheel and so that it will take very little effort for her to watch each of them in turn. The thought makes the soft parts of Sam’s skin crawl.
‘Professor Heene,’ Sam croaks, hoarse from the running, the fall, the almost-Autumn air. ‘I-’
But what is she going to say, exactly? She has no excuse for being late, unless dread is an excuse, in which case she is in the clear for at least the rest of the semester. Is she going to tell the truth? Will she confess that the thought of this midterm had her sitting on the edge of the bed, legs swinging, heels hitting the flagstones with a repetitive and eventually painful thud, thud, thud for almost forty five minutes before she could even get up and open her door? That would smack of insanity, to which no one in Auchter House pays much mind, or cowardice, which is a sin worse than most.
Professor Heene holds up one hand. There is powder pressed into the fine lines of her palm, too. And a swatch of lipstick on the back, just below her knuckles.
‘You have wasted enough time already,’ she says severely. ‘Sidney has explained enough, besides.’
Sam frowns. Too confused, too fearful, too numbed by at least an hour of incessant, obsessive thought to catch Heene’s drift, she is forced to follow the professor’s pointed glance and see, to her great surprise, that not everyone lying awkwardly on the terrible beige carpet is asleep. Across the room her best friend has raised her head, just a fraction, her dark eyes gleaming wetly in the dark.
‘The pipes,’ Sid hisses meaningfully, and stares at Sam very hard. ‘I told Professor Heene about that pipe that burst right outside our rooms and how we lost track of time trying to help.’
Sam turns back to Heen, wide-eyed. Inside her head everything is a dull, muffling fog.
‘The pipes,’ she nods. Frantically. ‘You wouldn’t believe the mess. I-’
But she stops.
Professor Heene is giving a look that suggests, very clearly, that she would not believe a thing Sam said if she produced physical evidence, a handwritten account, and ten eyewitnesses. This is neither entirely fair, nor entirely not.
Sam swallows drily.
‘You know Miss Sheridan,’ Heene says seriously. ‘That ten percent must be taken from your final grade on account of your lateness.’
Sam’s heart does not plummet. But it does sink. Leaden and dull.
‘Just mine?’ she asks, and looks guiltily at Sid.
Heene just shrugs, unconcerned, and produces from a wooden box beneath her chair a six-sided vial filled with a green, viscous liquid; oily looking it glistens in the odd light. And Sam, realising this is all the explanation she will be having for the time being, just takes it without a word.
In her six years at Auchter House she has seen and been a part of more miracles than she has fingers on either hand, and very little fairness. It is a university where you can study dreaming, or forgotten languages, future-telling, mind-reading, the locations of all the lost cities across the globe; where all of the portraits on the fifth floor are carnivorous and also possibly cannibalistic, where three different doors can’t decide where they open and where something at the bottom of the pool has been having a pleasant but undecipherable conversation with itself for about thirteen years. Rules other than the obvious ‘don’t get dead’ carry really only as much weight as any individual is willing to give them at any given moment. And there is nothing more shameful to say you do not understand.
It is also the place Sam loves best more than any other in the world and so she fixes Heene with a look that implies she loves to be spoken to like a very small and stupid child and searches for a spare patch of floor.
Of ten major exams in the past year Sam has passed five exceptionally, dragged herself through two and failed another three so badly the university has stopped allowing her retakes. She is shaking as she gets down onto her knees.
It feels odd and strangely intimate to arrange herself between the sleeping bodies, even if she knows each of them so very well, both awake and slightly less. To her right, her friend Bridge lies on their back, looking so blondly angelic that even Sam is fooled for a moment. To Bridge’s right is Nina and on Nina’s right is Sid and to Sam’s left-
To Sam’s left is Tate, who turns his face to her even as she is watching him, as if he can feel, even fast asleep, the strange weight of her gaze.
She looks at him for a moment. With his light brown skin and thick, dark hair Tate is unequivocally beautiful, all long lines and sharp angles. Sam wants, suddenly, to reach out and touch him. It is not a particularly unusual thought, not for her with him, but it makes her stomach itch worriedly and she is turning away even as Heene calls her name.
‘Sam,’ the professor says. Warningly.
And Sam lets her head fall back against the floor with the softest knock.
With nearly numb hands, she unscrews the top of the vial. The wold goes dark before she has reached the final drop.
2.
‘How does one define practical dreaming? How does one define space or touch or breath? Like most essential things, it’s easier to define by what it isn’t. It isn’t inoperable dreaming - prophecy, vision, memory. It is uninterested in probability, in theory, in supposition. The primary interest of the practical dreamer is in redefining the lines between the possible and the impossible, between what is and what could be…’ Augusta Brink, from ‘Practical Dreaming, A Compendium’ (1907)
When Sam discovered she had most of what it takes to be a practical dreamer she was asleep and a man who was also asleep, half a room away from her, pointed to something in her dream and said; ‘take this with you when you wake.’
She does not always remember if it was a sword or a mirror or a ring.
She does remember that she replied; ‘you want me to fucking what?’
She was eighteen and still unused to a reality where she was definitely not dying or imminently going to be, so enough things were impossible without the involvement of the even vaguely metaphysical. She had to be coaxed into it by the man with the blue eyes that she still did not really know, in this country she never thought she’d make it to, but she’d woken in the end with a sword or a ring or a mirror in her hand and that was some kind of start.
That same man stands in front of her now. His name is Matthew McCulloch and the actual meat of his body is hunched in that wicker chair in the first room directly to the right of the stairs but also he is here, in Sam’s dream and handsomely rumpled (or rumpledly handsome, depending on one’s personal stance). It is him she notices first, because people stand out to Sam more sharply than places and also because it is him, really, that she least wants to see.
Practical dreaming is only the art of applying what happens when you are dreaming to what happens when you are not. It’s no harder than thinking, really, it’s just the taking of things that belong in your head right back out of it again. It’s only trying to examine and study it that invites any needless complication in; although it is admittedly hard to imagine the future of academia without unnecessary complications, examination or studying.
The facts are these; Sam has been studying at Auchter since she was eighteen and she is a prodigiously good practical dreamer in many ways. If you were to ask her for a machine to make water flow backward; a jewel that sang you the time; a map; a cat; a rootless tree, Sam would go away and she would find or make that thing inside her head while she was dreaming and eight times out of ten when she woke again she would have it, there in her hand and mostly working. She is vastly better with the small and the specific, terrible with anything that is meant to move independently and if you want something that will rework waking physics, Sam might be your girl but the dream arithmetic will keep her awake at night.
The issue is that the ways in which Sam is a proficient dreamer are Sam’s ways; idiosyncratic, often baffling, hopelessly inefficient. All things told she will never be the dreamer she really could be unless she adopts the traditional methods and she will never adopt the traditional methods because she cannot get them to come clear in her head and this was never a problem as an undergrad and is, suddenly and starkly, a problem now that she is trying to take her studies further and lately she has begun to suffer under the awful condition of being undeniably average. And now she is afraid of exams and afraid of the man who sets them and a dream is never a safe place to feel afraid.
She has lived in Scotland and in Auchter House for all the best years of her life and she could not bear to leave either of them. And she is going to have to do the impossible again and she is so fucking tired.
‘Sam,’ says McCulloch, in that very kind way with which you can only really speak to someone who you have both known very well and had good cause to pity greatly.
‘I know I’m late,’ Sam says. Miserably and very quick.
McCulloch smiles, softly; ‘these things happen.’
Not, Sam wants to say, to everyone. But McCulloch is moving on.
‘It’s a simple test really,’ he says. ‘Just open the box and bring me the silver key inside.’
And there is a box there, Sam sees suddenly. There is a silver box and it sits on pale grey sand and the sky above them is pink and lighter at the centre than at any edge and there is not a breath of wind.
‘Why so simple?’ she asks. But McCulloch is already gone. All that remains where he stood is an hourglass that someone has taken the trouble of flipping over on Sam’s behalf.
The sand trickles down far faster than really it should. Sam hears it hissing as time goes by.
If you were dreaming your own dream and you were any good at it you would just walk over to that silver box and you would lift up the filigree lid and you would wake up again. If it were Sam’s dream, that’s what she would do too.
But this is not Sam’s dream, it is McCulloch’s, distilled into the dreambrew that he has drunk and Sam has drunk and Tate has drunk and Bridge and Sid and Nina and about fifty other students that night at the very least. This is McCulloch’s dream and the rules, if there are any, will be McCulloch’s rules and it is a different thing, altogether, to walk through somebody else’s mind.
All the same, Sam starts with the obvious. She reaches for the box.
The motherfucker gets up and walks away.
Quite literally. It sprouts spindly, looping legs like a house in a fairytale and it walks off, scuttles really, faster than Sam can catch up to it.
For a moment she just stands and stares and thinks that you could get to strongly dislike the inside of other people’s heads as much as the outside of them, as much as your own. Then heavy with dread and a shrinking sense of embarrassment she traipses off in the direction the box has taken.
And everything seems as fine as irritatingly surreal situations are able to until she realises that the distance between herself and the box, now just a block on the horizon, never seems to get any less at all. In fact it doubles with every step she takes so that in the space of three strides it has sextupled the lead it has on her. And she realises too that she has made the mistake of expecting a dream to behave like waking does; the suspension of disbelief once again all too much.
Sam is either a degree or two more or less insane than the average dreamer, or just simply not as clever as she needs to be be, but the truth is that she has often been so unable to accept that what happens when she wakes is really happening that believing in something as ephemeral as a dream is just a reach too far. She trusts very little that which she sees, nothing that she feels and remembers only about half of what healthily she should.
But she fumbles in her back pocket now, wincing at the thought that other people would probably carry a case or a bag or some other symbol of far better preparation and executive function and pulls out a pair of slightly unshapened pink-lensed glasses.
Sam does not wear glasses, has in fact joked unfunnily more than once that it is the only prescription she does not yet require, and if she had put these on her face before she fell asleep they would have done nothing except make her look extremely fucking cool. When she balances the six-lensed Brink’s Glasses on the edge of her nose now, though, she sees multitudes. She sees everything. It is more than seeing, really, it is understanding her surroundings on a level that almost makes up for the accompanying sense of profound and unbearable motion sickness.
With the Brink’s on, Sam can see the bright white bolts of energy that run through the seams of the dream like blood through capillaries. In the long swathe of space between where the box first stood and where it stands now the light is almost blinding, pulses beneath Sam’s feet more regularly than a heartbeat and faster, too. But to either side of her it tails off abruptly, is almost invisible only a very meaningless distance away.
And Sam understands that the box is able to move so fast and so erratically because all this energy is coursing through it, a wildly disproportionate amount, that it has been made practically into its own energy cell, a battery with compensation issues. If Sam had looked at it before she’d even reached out, she would have seen that. She would have known better than to try and grab it, would have known the dream could spike or shift or change, as unpredictable as lightning through a thunderstruck body.
But she didn’t look. She almost never does. Looking is very close to thinking. Pausing is very close to never getting started again.
She feels a sick lurch in her stomach at the thought of all that sand running down through the glass, before she consigns herself to another long, long walk.
If she can creep up on the box, come at it through one of the less energetic zones, the dream shouldn’t spike in the same way. This is what she has to promise herself as she gets going, and as she sees, far off on the horizon, another set of lights flare blindingly and then disappear altogether. The moment they are gone the dream feels different. Thinner. Sam’s footsteps seem to come more easily, she sinks less far into the ground, the sky is clearer and her thoughts too. And she knows that the dream is stretched now less thinly, and knows too that this is because somebody must have left it. Solved the puzzle and gone. Won. Tate or Bridge or Sid or Nina. While Sam is still here. And still walking.
When she sees the box again it is after a very long walk up an even steeper hill. She cannot lose her breath in this realm, does not, at the very least, have to fight her own body through it but the dream has stretched and thinned a second time in the time it takes her to get over the hill and down again and by the time she reaches the box there are panicked, angry tears scorching at the edges of her eyes.
The dream is almost dead here. Quiet and dark. The box does not leap up again when Sam seizes it in both hands.
All it does is burn.
Immediately the heat bites down through layers of Sam’s skin. Traps itself deep within. She wails and there is no use telling herself that she cannot really be hurt inside this dream, that she will wake up unburnt and unharmed and it is little consolation either when the box that has tumbled from her hands bursts open upon the ground.
Snakes burst hissing from inside it. More than should have fit within the box and bigger, bodies as wide across as Sam’s palm or wider, wriggling and writhing in any direction. Sam is not afraid of snakes but she is afraid of these, which are black and coated in some kind of oil; or perhaps it drips from them or perhaps they weep it. These snakes move in a way that makes her feel like they can’t be snakes at all, jerky and at odd angles and she gets the strange but horrible idea that they are really people trapped within snakes or that she is perhaps a person within a snake and she is just beginning to feel sick when the dream darkens and brightens again and the snakes are gone.
And instead she is standing barefoot in a blue-tiled kitchen and a lady in a blue twinset and pearls is sat at a table picking a carcass clean of meat. She cannot really be Sam’s grandmother, who is a vegan mechanic never seen outside of overalls and a fishing sweater, but the dream does not allow for such things and so in the dream she is exactly what she appears. She sits there and she is disapproving and the carcass is enormous and oddly wet looking and Sam’s grandmother’s fingers are inside its mouth. Rummaging. Pulling.
Dark then bright again. But now there is something beneath Sam’s skin. She first feels it somewhere in the vicinity of her left kneecap. An itch. A crawling. A crawling that grows.
Sam does not look down. She does not lift the hem of her jeans. She knows if she does either of these things there will be a mass there, a bulging that feeds from her. That burrows. That moves.
Dark then bright. The snakes are around her feet now. They leave black marks behind them as they brush against her sneakers, a long silt-stain across her jeans as they begin to wrap around her calves.
Dark then bright. Sam’s grandmother has blood beneath her French-tips and as she claws with her fingers at the carcass’s insides Sam feels a pressure beneath her tongue. At the corner of her jaw.
Dark then bright and the mass has changed its mind. Is moving upward now and as it moves Sam is sure she hears a noise, soft but certain. A faint, animal squeak.
Dark then bright. Dark then bright. Things crawling on and out and into her. Dark then bright, she closes her eyes, but the problem is not the seeing but the feeling. Dark then bright, Sam starts to cry, for real this time and terrified and her heart is a stupid, laughable animal inside her stupid, laughable rib cage and it will run itself out until it dies.
Dark then bright. Dark then bright. Snakes then grandmother then mass. Snakes then grandmother then snakes then-
The pressure beneath her tongue is unbearable. Something sharp is pressing upwards through her skin, like a third row of teeth and Sam is wild now, wild enough to cram her own fingers through her jaws and claw, unhesitatingly, her fingernails slicing sharper than ever they have done in reality down through thin flesh and webbed blood vessels. And something fat is between her fingers. Something smooth and cold.
When she pulls the key from beneath her own teeth it is covered in blood and she is covered in blood and when she wakes again there is very little consolation at all in being clean.