Wandering the twisting halls of Memory, you may find a room near that house’s rear border whose door has no knob, and whose lock has no key. As you approach, either it will swing open for you, or it will remain closed. But return another day if you wish –– on that day, it may open anew.

Inside the room is a forest lined with trees whose roots grow both into the sky and the soil, whose branches stretch to soak in the light of mindstuff that floats in tiny motes through the air. The golden thought courses through its nerves, spilling past wooden capillaries into rivulets of intention, churned by some archaic alchemy into gray sap, which is squeezed from cracks in the plant’s bark.

Suckling on these trickles of thought are plum-colored cocoons, swelling and pregnant with memory. When they have grown enough, a Caretaker comes to cut a pupaic mass free from its birthing prison. This Caretaker gently massages life into the purple worm that emerges, cradling it in soothing embrace. The creature’s quartet of appendages swirl to life, unfurling in ripples. The sucker at the end of each stretches, flexing to sniff out its first independent sources of nourishing thought.

As it must with each parent’s, all too soon the Caretaker’s time with the adolescent mind creatures comes to an end. Off they are nudged, to wriggle to their way toward self-discovered springs of intellect. Soon they will find that thoughts are best plucked from unguarded minds, lost in a labyrinth of sleep.

Attaching their flagellant suction cups to the head of unwary sleepers, the purple worms gorge themselves on recollection fleeing from cranial incubation, drinking themselves full and expelling chaotic mishmashes of what was ingested. The memory passes through their tubular bodies as would a log through a chipper, splintering into component parts what was once coherent.

The providers of this somatic meal do their best to forge logic from the thought parasite’s expelled memory fragments. Upon waking, the victims of this invisible mental predator will recall snippets of this twisted blend of reality, referring to these false images, grown from trees the length of thought away, as “dreams.”