I’m sitting in the sun, in a dusty courtyard with walls made of stone. The ground is just dirt. There is a pear tree on the far side of the courtyard, & under that, a well. I’m sitting on a large flat stone that is closer to the gate, looking at & into a beautiful instrument. It’s shaped like a guitar, but made of glass & steel. It’s amazing & immediately I want to keep it. I try playing it & it plays well.

Then the instrument dream-morphs into another instrument, very similar to the first, but this one is covered with brown & white cow hide, except for the front face which remains transparent, & there is a thick white mane of fur around the outside, fraying over the edges, so that I have to separate the fur to get at the strings. I am looking inside, through the glass, & seeing how the thick strings are laced through the framework & fed up to the wide fret board. At first there are only 5 strings, but as I play it there is another dream-morph & suddenly there are 20 or more, thin strings.

An older man enters the cour tyard. He is somewhere in his fifties, but dressed like a raver; face paint (zinc?), a floppy blue hat, & some sarong type thing— like a green toga. He sor t of looks like he just came from burning man. He tells me that his job is to just walk around & look cool & think about how to market music. He talks more but it all just washes over me, & all that sticks is the thought that his job sounds odd, & difficult & boring at the same time. He goes over to the well & looks inside, then picks fruit off the pear tree. When he returns he offers me fruit off a plate, but the plate holds peaches, not pears. I don’t take any peaches. He says he’s not surprised that I like the fur & glass guitar.

Suddenly 6 or 7 other people appear all around me, & the old raver has a pit-bull on a leather leash. I am still on the low flat stone holding the guitar. The pitbull is grey, & doesn’t like me, so as a (half) joke I instigate a staring contest with the dog, & the dog star ts to growl. The people around me laugh at the standoff, in a friendly way, but secretly I am nervous the dog will attack me. So I decide to sing to the dog while playing the guitar (which I now play by strumming with one hand, & only pressing harder or softer upon the many thin strings with the other; tightening or loosening the tension, but not moving my fingers around the frets in any way). I sing to the dog in a sor t of faux-Elvis-stutterstyle, but really I’m singing to the dog’s owner:

“You come ‘round with your p-p-plate of peaches, you come ‘round lookin’ for t-t-treats, cuz you’re a little hound doggy... & you ain’t no friend of mine.”