My musings were quickly curtailed, for obnoxious creatures loomed on the horizon. From very numerous tributaries all manner of corpses and decomposed bodies assailed my already incredulous and overworked eyes. The endless trail of long since deceased effluent, discharged from so many charnel houses, had succeeded in finding a means of propulsion where I had failed. I was soon caught up in the zombie flow. The movements were unbearable enough as it was, yet worse still I even recognised several bone heads, those where a few fleshly features still hung, but I could not name them. Still, as I gazed upon each semirecollected rotted countenance, each returned the glance with a revolting nod.

Some of the sickly sewage must have seeped into my eyes, for the dream was temporarily lost to me. Soon I became aware of my body once more. I was tumbling through what I can only describe as a vivid void, for it was light and delicate, but in essence just as foul as its superficial but ultimately false antithesis, the black abyss which I experienced at the bottom of the cellar staircase.

Emerging from the vivid void, I found myself watching the zombie-flow wend its way along a rickety road. Screaming skulls passed me, driven onward by their own foul and noisy breath. Skeletons of murderers ran into a red brick house which was dwarfed by its own cyclopean chimney stack belching out black bones and murky skulls. I watched as every corpse was cremated. Then the picture faded and was replaced by another.

In a grotto, Pan began to prescind his penis. I turned away, but the Greek god leapt upon me, thrusting the huge severed member down my throat. I have never before felt such a powerful combination of illness and exhilaration; the detached organ swiftly completed its passage through my body and was borne aloft into the skies, through a hole in the cave roof, by cracked, withered and quivering aeon-aged angels to some unknown destination, or patron. The self-amputee had disappeared too.

I was just preparing myself for the dissolution of this episode, when I was, once more, taken aback. I found the grotto metamorphosing in a subtle, virtually imperceptible manner all around me: black arcadia and crumbling vistas, until finally the image halted, when it reached a type of warped arboretum which made even the most grotesque bonsai look quite wholesome. The twigs and branches grew downwards, and thrust themselves so deeply into the satanic-looking soil that they rapidly became indistinguishable from the mad, twisted roots. Even the wildest works of Rodolphe Bresdin fail to hint at such morbid growths as these. This tree garden became so thoroughly dense that all light was blotted out.

By and by, scintillating sparks impinged upon my dream-consciousness. I feared forest fire, and attempted to negotiate a path through the bountiful profusions of perennial plants, but could find none. They too had proved purely transient, or perhaps they had merely continued on their downward spiral, burrowing into the ground. This fancy was unfounded too for the soil was undisturbed and even felt smooth underfoot.