He held to his core, buffeted by the dreams around him. Isaac flew over a spiky town, a six-year-old girl laughing delightedly in a language he had never heard but momentarily understood as his own; he bucked with inexpert excitement as he dreamed the sex dream of a pubescent boy; he swam through estuaries and visited strange grottoes and fought ritualistic battles. He wandered through the flattened veldt of the daydreaming cactacae mind. Houses morphed around him with the dreamlogic that seemed to be shared by all the sentient races of Bas-Lag.

New Crobuzon appeared here and there, in its dream form, in its remembered or imagined geography, with details highlighted and others missing, great gaps between streets that were traversed in seconds.

There were other cities and countries and continents in these dreams. Some were doubtless dreamlands born behind flickering eyelids. Others seemed references: oneiric nods to solid places, cities and towns and villages as real as New Crobuzon, with architecture and argots that Isaac had not seen or heard.

The sea of dreams in which he swam, Isaac realized, contained drops from very far afield.

Less of a sea, he thought drunkenly from the bottom of his unstuck mind, and more of a consommé. He imagined himself chewing stolidly on the gristle and giblets of alien minds, lumps of rancid dream sustenance floating in a thin gruel of half-memories. Isaac retched mentally. If I throw up in here I’ll turn my head inside out, he thought.

The memories and dreams came in waves. Tides carried them in thematic washes. Even adrift in the wash of random thoughts, Isaac was carried across the vistas inside his head on recognizable currents. He succumbed to the tugging of money dreams, a trend of recollections of stivers and dollars and head of cattle and painted shells and promise-tablets.

He rolled in a surf of sex dreams: cactacae men ejaculating across the earth, across the rows of eggbulbs planted by the women; khepri women rubbing oil across each other in friendly orgies; celibate human priests dreaming out their guilty, illicit desires.

Isaac spiralled in a little whirlpool of anxiety dreams. A human girl about to enter her exams, he found himself walking nude to school; a vodyanoi watercræfter whose heart raced as stinging saline water poured back from the sea into his river; an actor who stood dumb on stage, unable to recall a single line of his speech.

My mind’s a cauldron, Isaac thought, and all these dreams are bubbling over.

The slop of ideas came quicker and thicker. Isaac thought of that and tried to latch onto the rhyme, focusing on it and investing it with portent, repeating it quicker and quicker and thicker and thicker and quicker, trying to ignore the barrage, the torrent, of psychic effluvia.