I woke up looking out the window at the Aztec skyline of the City of the Dead, red in the morning light. My head and chest were charged with a mania that felt like prana fire, like the premature kundalini awakening of a yogi who hasn’t yet attained the highest wisdom.

Things were far too real. I watched the pyramids burn with the third-eye sleep-vision you get in the interzone where dreams aren’t quite real, reality not quite a dream. I remembered to breathe.

“Why is it,” I forced myself into linear thought, “Why is it that I always wake up in the middle of a dream? Why am I not allowed to wake up normally, in my own time?”

“Because,” said the voice, “You don’t respect other people.”

Three sentences into my day and already an imbroglio.

On the train into the City of Rain I watched the seam of new concrete zip by on the tubular wall. I’ve always been fascinated with concrete — it’s like cartoons, or rollerblading. The non-repeating patterns mean even skinning your elbow isn’t that bad, never as bad as the panic of the onlookers.

The seam flowed past, station after station. Still not fully awake, in a serious delirium, still feeling the saw-tooth edge of caffeinated exhaustion, I stretched and imagined my arm going through the wall of the train and grinding the tissue down, elbow-first, grating it along the pristine wall with no pain. “A kilometer of blood”, I wrote in my journal.

No! Something better, healthier, less self-destructive: Animated graffiti, twisting lines of paint, the blood rendered in technicolor coiling its way through every tube, weaving into a rainbow snake binding the core in thin hemp rope, giving lumbar serpent power to the City of Shibari.