intermission

Somebody passed the glass contraption to Ian, an oversized semi-waterfilled beaker with a large cylinder extending out of the opening atop the beaker and with a pipe bowl slotted into the beaker’s side. Join me behind his eyes as he grips the cylinder. Feel the glass warmed by his friends’ hands and sticky but not wet with their fingerprints as he transfers the instrument from his right to his left hand. Look down the outside of the cylinder like through the sights mounted on the barrel of a rifle at the miniature glass bowl filled to the brim with dissected hemp buds, a mix of tiny leaves, nuggets representing several shades of green and purple, and orange filaments. Ian exhales and empties your lungs stopping with a short wheeze that feels like it was caused by the pleura covering his lungs rubbing together. Feel your right hand grip the incendiary device tightly in his palm and the sandy roughness of the flint as you flick it with your thumb to cause a spark and land pressing down on the springy plastic tab to release the flammable gas. 

You put your lips within the rim of the opening at the top of the glass tube and begin to inhale as you watch the flame move over the bowl and the tip of the flame bend to incinerate the herbs and see the orange hairs slowly turn to black and dust like fuses. See the char spread like nuclear fallout or an eclipse moving to engulf a forest in shade, hear the bubbling of the fumes through the water in the flask, and taste the skunky smoke fill up the glass tubes to your lips. You pull the bowl from the flask and pull the smoke into your lungs, the inhaled air lighting up the folds in your esophagus with a slight sting. Ian was still in the stage of his life where his friends were generous and impressed, not annoyed at the lack of etiquette, that he had toasted the entire dose that had been packed into the bowl and exhaled a thick cloud slowly into the air between him and his friends for the night. As you exhale, feel the edges of your eyes go raw and almost itchy as the veins in the whites of Ian’s eyes dilate and your shared eyelids get heavy with a sweet dark sleepiness. 

The throbbing in your throat subsides and your focus is drawn to a calming relief and what feels like the opposite of a headache spreading like poured sugar to fill in a headband-shaped area underneath the scalp above your prefrontal cortex, from temple to temple. As the cannabinoid receptors are sparked in your brain, whether there are touch receptors in your gray matter or not, you feel them stir up your creativity as the smoke dissipates in front of you. Ian waits for a lull in the conversation as he passes what his elders in the old country called a water pipe and then begins to pontificate. You feel and hear the words resonate as he brings up the seemingly interesting idea that the existence of the word ‘nightmare,’ which refers to distressing dreams about things that, if possible to manifest, are to be avoided, implies there is room for an uncoined term for positive dreams “since the word ‘dream’ refers to anything your mind simulates including nightmares.” 

“Let’s call it a ‘daymare’,” said Dave.

“Eh, that sounds awkward,” Sarah chimed in, “plus that would be what you call a daydream that goes wrong.”

“Isn’t a bad daydream just a worry?” Dave mocked.

Sarah blushed, “Oh yeah.” 

Privately she thought she had still made a valid point, but she did not want to appear argumentative or make Dave feel stupid by pointing out that positive daydreams could be trivialized as mere goals just as negative daydreams could be called worries. She carried on her train of thought internally with the idea that there is a thin line between daydreaming and wishing, and between day-nightmare-ing and worrying; especially given how much more was genuinely possible technologically and socially for her generation, Gen D, or Delta, the Change Generation, and not just the stuff of dreams.

“Howabout a male horse, I always forget, is it a stallion?” Dave continued, trying to think of an opposite to the word ‘mare’ if the genders can be considered opposing poles at either end of a spectrum.

Ian replied, “I think so.” 

“Day stallion,” Steve finished the thought. 

“No, that’s no good.”

“Daynag?” said Matt who had just learned the word ‘nag’ from a cowboy movie.

“What’s a nag?” said Rachel, “sounds sexist.”

“Yeah, sounds like a putdown to me,” said Steve.

“Or it’s like a pun, like it nags at you,” Dave added. 

“A nag is an old or lame horse,” said Matt. “How’bout a different animal?”

“Also, why does it have to be a day animal, shouldn’t it still be a night animal? The first

part of the word shouldn’t be the opposite,” Ian said with a laugh.

 “Right, duh. Nightnag?” said Dave. They ignored him; ‘nag’ had already been rejected.

 “Ok, ok, get ready for it,” said Matt, “nightstag.” He looked into the air above his head and waved his hands there as if to reveal the word on a marquee. 

“Kind of sounds German, not English,” said Steve.

“True, true” said Ian, “languages mix all the time though, plus…” 

Steve interrupted, “I just have a hard time liking anything German.” 

Ian continued, “… I’m part German, I was gonna say,” 

“Oh,” Steve laughed sheepishly, “Sorry, the language is kinda gross though still, you have to admit, my light bigotry aside.”

“Yeah, sounds like Reichstag. Too much phlegm in the sound of that word, forget about connotation, blech,” seconded Dave. 

They all stopped talking to scroll through the majestic or mythic animals in their memories or ponder the historical roots (in the second of three now-called Intercontinental Wars) of Steve and Dave’s half-serious bias against Germanic culture. 

“Nighthawk?” 

“Taken by a comic book company.” 

“Nightboar.”

“Dumb.” 

“Night-squatch,” they all laughed. 

“Night owl.”

“Already means something,” they started to get bored. 

“Maybe there’s a reason there’s no single word for a good dream, like the untarnished

dream is always good, and a nightmare is a naturally good thing turned bad,” said Sarah.

“Oh man, maybe that’s what the ‘w-o-’ in ‘woman’ should be considered, an 

advancement to the base model: man,” said Dave.

“That’s dumb,” said Rachel, “they are not inherently better or worse than each other.” 

“Ok, but the language supposedly implies that ‘woman’ is a modification of the word ‘man’ so why not make the implication that the woman is better?”

“Because it’s still a stereotype. They’re barely different.”

“Well, that’s debatable, but never mind,” Dave immediately regretted saying. He paused, giving Rachel time to either call him a pronoun-challenged neanderthal supporter of the patriarchy or give him a pass. She let her knee-jerk rage subside, after all her fight was not with the well-meaning but not fully progressed, progressive Dave’s of the world. Relieved, Dave continued, “Ok, I got it. What about: Night-stang?” 

“Mmm, like mustang?” said Steve, “I dunno, that’s like people saying workaholic even though that term still has part of the word alcohol in there, it should be work-ic or work addict, not workaholic.” They all laughed again. 

“You know what? Nightstag works,” Ian concluded.

The six thoroughly THC-infused friends spiraled off into their own pseudo-philosophical trains of thought and quietly settled into the pliable warmth of the space between the couch cushions of their minds to mine whatever cognitive coins and crumbs they would. 

Look at the smoke in between the circle of thinkers as it picks up the changes in lighting from the television screen. Let us go, deep into the flickering smoke where their fragments of brilliant and mundane epiphanies coalesce into our story: a nightmare for some, a fantasy for others, but always a dream. The phrase ‘Life is a dream,’ can mean everything is an illusion or an interpretation and there is no accessing truth without great mental effort to deduce the underlying structures of reality that we drape with meaning or that life is great. In the case of this book, a story comprised of a collection of adapted truths and total fabrications, the characters’ lives are both ephemeral imaginings and testaments to the beauty of dreams brought to life. Come with me into the smoke, as you hear your heavy breathing louder and louder in your ears and our story continues. You float through the cloud until you are now in brisk oceanside fog and the sound of your breathing morphs into the panting of someone sprinting toward you…