It was fucking four in the morning when I got the text. Yo dawg, it said. I heard you like mushi. I rolled over and moaned. Beside me, Rae did something between a grunt and a roar. "Was that your phone," he muttered, "or a fucking air raid siren." I made a face. "I have to keep it loud," I whispered, "or I'll sleep through texts and stuff! Give me a little credit here," I added. "Somebody could be at death's door. They could have Garasu Yasumononohōseki crawling out of their eyeholes. I gotta be ready for this shit!"

"Mrrrn.Fuck you," Rae mumbled. He turned over and fell back asleep. I grabbed my phone, pounded the little screen with my thumbs: Who is this? A few seconds inched by. Someone who needs help, was the response. 4173 Nugent Street. Come quick. I'll bake you cookies. I raised an eyebrow. "What?" I said aloud.

I pulled up at the address ten minutes later in my 1995 Rav 4, a thermos of coffee and my mushi gear in tow. I looked around before I got out of the car. A bland suburban neighborhood, but pleasant. Only a couple minutes east of the college. Not bad. Whoever it was would pay all right. Not that I do this for the money.

I got out and knocked on the door. Fiddled with the drawstrings on my pouch of mushi tobacco, wondering if I'd need it. When she answered the door, my mouth watered a little – she was bookishly sexy – big round prescription glasses, short hair. High cheekbones. Kind of a noble, arrogant look. She looked about twenty-eight, and she wore a pale green kimono, the kind of thing you'd sleep in if you were into being fancy. She took me in sternly. "Cookies are in the oven," she said tersely. She turned around and walked into the living room, leaving the door open for me to follow.

The living room was awash in green – green sofa, green cushiony armchairs. The walls were nicely wood paneled, and I could smell the cookies' smell – fuck yeah, chocolate chip! I thought – wafting in from the kitchen next door. I laid out my stuff on the sofa and took a seat, setting my thermos delicately on the glass coffee table. She walked briskly out of the kitchen and came to roost primly on the edge of an armchair. "I've been having dreams," she said, shortly. "Not good ones."

I raised an eyebrow. "Could I…uh, like…have your name first?" I grinned sloppily, held out a hand. "I'm Chase." She fidgeted, wrung her hands. "Right," she said stiffly. "Names. I'm Tracy." She smiled an awkward, wooden smile and stuck out her hand to shake mine.

"Anyway," I said, still half-smiling, "what kind of dreams?"

"Not normal ones," she said, and the left corner of her mouth twitched a little. "Normally, I don't know, normally I just dream about old girlfriends or getting fired. Sometimes I dream I'm pregnant and I give birth to this big white bird. But these dreams are different. I…" she hesitated. "I tried to talk to my shrink about them. He had nothing. Told me they were out of his jurisdiction. That was the phrase he used. He told me to get a mushi-shi." She bit her lip. "I found your number on that website."

I chuckled. "Mushi Unlimited?" She nodded. I was a little embarrassed; the site was the Craigslist of all things mushi, but it was a good way to get your business out there. I'd signed up only a few years ago, hoping to draw some customers.

She continued: "Anyway, these dreams." She screwed up her eyebrows, and her forehead folded in places. "These dreams…my characters," she put her fingertips on her forehead, and shook her head back and forth. "I can't take it," she whispered. I arched an eyebrow. "Your…what?"

She kept shaking her head. "My characters…all screaming." She was muttering now; her words came out faint and half-finished. I thought for a minute. "Screaming?" I said softly. "Do tell."

"I'm a writer. Haven't published or anything, but I'm pretty serious about it. Took a few writing classes in college. I read a lot. Anyway. About a month ago, I was up all night working on this one story. Drunken, miserable writer girl meets politically active, hippie girl. They get together. They break up. They get together again. It ends with vegan pancakes and triumphant, sloppy makeouts. But there were a lot of drafts. In one hippie girl gets stolen away by buff motorcycle dude, and drunken writer girl gets depressed and drinks herself to death. In another one they have a fight and drunken writer shoves hippie out of a window by accident. She falls to her death. In another one drunken writer girl proposes. Hippie refuses, gets scared of commitment, and runs off with drummer of a crappy local bluegrass band.

So I'm up all night working on all of this, driving myself nuts with all the drafts and rewrites. When I finally get to bed I have this dream. Hippie, having fallen out of a window, gets up from a pool of her own blood and looks at me with wide eyes. 'Don't let me go,' she whispers. She stretches out her hand and I'm getting farther and farther away from her. 'Don't let me go!' she screams, hysterical. Then buff motorcycle dude comes on the scene, reaching out a rippling, tattooed arm, extending a hand toward my face. He's covered in cuts and slashes from all the times I've redone him. He's dissolving into an ashen mist from the feet up. 'Don't let me go,' he whispers. Same thing happens with bluegrass drummer. At some point they all pile up on top of each other, fighting for my hand as I drift away above them.

Their screams are still echoing in my head when I wake up in a cold sweat. I shake myself off, get some coffee, shower and go to work. But that night the same thing happens. And the next night, and the next and the next and the next. All my drafts working their way into my dreams, screaming bloody murder until I wake up panting.

But I'm damn determined to finish this story. So I keep hacking away at it, and with each draft I write, the dreams get worse. Populated by more and more spit-out characters, more discarded situations. Hippie girl screams at me from inside a burning roadside diner that was going to be the place of the final scene. The diner didn't burn in the draft. Drunken writer shoves what was going to be her first big time novel in my face and yells accusations at me. You get the picture.

But these dreams. They're destroying me. They're shredding my brain from the inside out. I don't want to go to sleep anymore. I've been awake for thirty-six hours now. I don't want it anymore. I never wanted it in the first place. If it goes on any longer I don't know what I'll do."

She stared at me from her perch on the green armchair. She was breathing shallowly. Her eyes were hollow and, I noticed for the first time that morning, sunken. She was clutching the edges of the chair, and her nails were making marks.

I thought for a minute. Reached into my mental mushi manual and rifled through its pages. I had been at this for about four years – dropped out of college at 20, said, fuck it, I can see these things. I'm all in, you sons of bitches. I wasn't going to let this thing out of my grip. I was going to pin it down whisper, say uncle, motherfucker.

Minutes passed. Then I said, "I think I know what your problem is."

Her eyes widened. She bit her lower lip. "What is it," she said, her voice a shred of a whisper.

"Well," I began, "think about mushi for a moment. They're at the root of life, right? That means they can live almost anywhere. They can inhabit almost any conceivable environment."

She nodded, slowly. A light was starting to turn on behind those murky, darkened eyes.

"That includes," I said, slowly, "the imagination. Dreams. Make-believe things. The imagination's a space, right? It's liminal, elusive. It's slippery. But it can be lived in still." I saw hope start to dawn in those eight balls. It was refreshing. Hella job satisfaction, yo. "So," I continued, "you've got mushi in your mind's eye. They're literally bringing your characters to life. Animating your imaginal landscape, making it more than just a pastime." Her eyes darkened as she took it in. She had already guessed it: "so as you throw away your rough drafts, you're threatening their existence. They live in this place you created, and you're tearing it down. Like building townhouses on a park where drifters sleep. They're resisting."

She digested it. Chewed her lower lip a little. Clenched her jaw. Fiddled with her glasses. "So what do I do," she whispered. "I can't just let them die, can I?"

I sighed. "No, you can't. That'd be wrong as fuck." Her nose twitched prettily. "So what? What the hell do I do?" she said. I grinned. Reached into the backpacking pack I keep my mushi stuff in. Took out a small, blue stone. It glowed faintly. "This," I said proudly, "is a dream stone. It draws mushi that are of a more ethereal nature."

Her eyes widened. "Wow," she said, her tone hushed. "So what are you going to do, draw them out of me?"

I smiled. "Yep," I said. "Pretty much. Sit still for a minute."

I began to pass the stone around her head in circles. I could feel it tugging them, bumping them rudely out of her mind like waves pulling on a buoy rope. A thin stream of bluish mist began to stream out of first one temple, then the other. It was over after a few minutes. She broke out into a smile. "Thanks, Chase," she said. Then: "oh, shit! Shit shit shit shit! The cookies!"

Neither of us had noticed the smoke coming from the kitchen. She ran to the oven, took out a tray of charcoal. Grinned sheepishly. "Crap," she said. Then she started to laugh. "God, this is so ridiculous," she said between gales of giggles. "This whole thing," she gasped, "is just so fucking ridiculous. Isweartogod, I'm never writing again."

I grinned at her. "Nah, you can still write. Just keep this on your desk." I handed her the dream stone. "And if they come back, give me a call." She was still laughing, and she shook her head. "Okay," she said. "Fine. I'll keep writing. It's a good pastime. Almost fucking killed me, but it's a good pastime."

I grinned. She sent me the check a few days later. It was a whopper.