Her dream pillow was inducing too many dreams. Some of them were lucid enough to escape and got caught by the dream catcher over her bed, which scooped them up and netted them back into the pillow like basketballs through a hoop, where their scents mingled with its lavender, mugwort, and hops.

Several of them gave off the powerful stench of nightmares, burning flesh and sulphur; others had the mild, pleasant lemony laundry-like odor of everyday dreams. The lucid ones smelled like the smoke of lit molten glass; the sexual ones of musk, sweat, and smegma. But the precognitive dreams were the worst. They smelled of decayed, screaming black hole roses.

She ripped her pillow open and all her trapped dreams spilled out, in a profusion of smell, image, and noise. She opened the window wider to let them out and air the room.

One of them got caught in her hair though and became reality.