It was Little Poochie that greeted them first, his tongue lapping their tasty bodies with delight. Mr Runcible's welcome proved less cheerful. As they writhed and murmured on the bed, clinging to the dewy body of their dreaming Mother - soapy froth bubbling forth from rubbing seams - Mr Runcible unleashed all his fury. But the storm of his temper dissipated upon the swamp of their engorgement … Instead of torment, from his wrath, Helen's children were given the wrenching deliverance of ecstasy, an ecstasy more rapturous than any they had known before.

Mr Runcible rushed from the closet in terror (Little Poochie close on his heels, avid to slurp up every last discarded drop), and Helen awoke at once to behold her unGodly brood …

That, of course, was only the beginning.

Like joyous worms, the babies - or something similar - poked their snouts against their mother's flesh and nuzzled in the broth still flowing from her dewy dreams.

Mr Runcible was not seen again, nor was Little Poochie. The gentleman resided, it was said, along with that forever romping pup, in a roominghouse somewhere in the industrial, northern section of the city, and demanded frequent deliveries (staunchly unrewarded by gratuities) from the local hamhocks shop (which was averred by rumor to double as a brothel on Saturdays and holidays).

"A life of free will may be lived in dreams or in despair," their mother advised her children before nodding off to death.

"Our life is a dream of despair!" they repeated happily.

Once they had exuberantly, but reverently, devoured their cherished mother's fleshly husk, the hundreds of her litter fell into a pleasing orgy, reminiscent of the blissful womb, and soon there was no telling one from the other … for their slippery bodies had congealed together into a fresh modality, perfect in form and divine in essence.

And from a primeval pool shared collectively across their networked brains - or something similar - an Idea emerged like an ancient hero from his bath, dripping and clean: to make the world itself Their dream, but not of despair, no, of ecstasy, thus perfecting existence for all who lived there.

Death, ah! that immitigable pestilence upon all mortal bodies once dreaded by the sentient Man became in one fell swoop a dream of ecstatic and unending joy! Once the world had been transformed into the pliant stuff of children's fancies, all the folk of History, on- and under-ground, threw off the yokes of labor and fended away the depredations of decay, grasping to themselves a new and, though strange, familiar mantle made of dream-stuff (admittedly still redolent of roasted swine and drunken navymen in pubs, but Mr Runcible's influence on this newly recreated world was otherwise felt, at most, subtly, if at all).

That's, yes, how it all began.

It has not ended, either, it is true, or else your head would not possess the eyes to read these words … or, if you're listening to this account, your ears … but aspects of the story, heretofore, have not been public, and astonishment will soon addle your receptive brain, I wager, if you are a sensitive sort, which I know to be the case, as we are in this dream together, brothers and sisters!

Upon the unexpected (except, of course, by Helen, who all along had been predicting it), instantaneous rendering to perfection of the world into the dream of Helen's children (they all joined together in a perfect and eternal body assembled of themselves and glued by the Divine admixture of all Helen's bodies,-ethereal, material, chemical and atomic, topological (in spaces both Euclidean and non-), electrico-magnetomical, and (for the sake of comprehensiveness) not excluding inexistent), Rhea became freed from the house's plumbing to explore the limitlessness of Time and Space. Her preference was to remain in the pipes and continue to serenade her cherished daughter's living essence … but Helen was no longer available for haunting, being, in one sense, dead herself … and sadly, Helen's ghost could not join her mother, either, for the spiritual stuff of Helen indeed constituted one of the most critical ingredients of that cement that held her rapturous brood together in a body of such magnitude, divinity, and grace that it could host a fever dream as expansive and eternal as the world itself …

Thus, Rhea wandered through the newly made and deathless world, weeping, oh! continually (the hundred pieces of her dismembered body spread evenly around the globe, each bone and bit of gristle equipped with its own wailing mouth and tireless in its exercise), lonely as no other being in her daughter's spawn's Creation was, for only she was bereft of her beloved object - Helen, after all, had been consumed utterly in order to construct this eternal dream of life and death and all between - whereas all others, living and dead, were amicably corporeal and reunited with all those whom they loved and hated.

Years passed, however, and Rhea's misery proved catching, as the melancholy, yet melodious, music of her anatomically and globally multiplied desolation came to permeate the dream's prevailing mood, inspiring in the people of the world strange and dark musings … Romantic poetry … philosophy of Mind … theology of End … art in celebration of perversion and park-bench rants extolling decadent, indecent visions … Onanism in the bath … and of course, more music, often in a minor key, thus propagating even further on the face of our oneiric sphere a rampant cyclone of despair.

As the decades and centuries progressed upon the back of weary Time, and the dream of the world gradually descended from its initial state of ecstasy unto a lowly station of despair (in keeping with that advice that Helen's brood had received from her on their birthday), the ghosts of the world gathered in a grand hotel in Basel, Switzerland, for they sensed their moment was approaching. Rhea represented to them a sort of prophet of the dismal fate in store for sentient Man, although, herself, the Great Mother of All Weeping persisted unaware of their increasing adulation. She had nothing in her heart or sensations but longing for the lost daughter, who could not be found in flesh or spirit …

Secretly, the Society of Apparitions and Demoniacals (S.A.D.) - as the ghosts of the world nominated themselves during the First Order of Business at their great Alpine Convention - commenced a project to fulfill the Destiny of Man, which both their Idol (Rhea) and Progenitor (Helen) had augured in their separate fashions.

And that, truly, was the beginning of this new phase in which we find ourselves.

Divinity begins in Death!

There is no Dream that Death shall not Transform to Dust!

Ghost Life is Eternal Life!

Tombment is Eternal Triumph!

In these and other slogans now familiar to us, a new order of consciousness was promulgated across the world by advertising agencies and journalists of every stripe. People both alive and dead, weakened of their will and sapped of their joy by Rhea's perpetual haunting of all Time and Space, took comfort in the notion of divinity divorced from sorrow to be achieved beyond the dream of the world; and as their enthusiasm waned for the continued perfection of this dream, so too waned the dreamer's energy to persist in the dreaming of that perfection.

She had inspired the new decline, but Rhea did not know it. When her entreaties - no longer wailed into the Void, but now into a dense host of eager, perceptive minds that responded with alacrity and reverence to every gust that emanated from her raging, spectral throat - began to bear the fruit of worship and sacrificial ceremonies in the ancient vein, Rhea hardly knew what to do with these unexpected fumes arising from the fatty slabs laid out all at once upon the world's billion altars every week when Rheasday came around (and of course, in the bitterest winter month of Rhea, when the celebration of the Ides commenced with the slaughter and roasting of a virgin child elected to the coveted role by her superior resemblance to an old photograph of Helen that was reproduced in a particular painting, on display to this day in the Presidential Palace No. 53, located at the intersection of the Avenue of Justice and Belle Rêve Boulevard in New Hollywood, Amsterdam.).

Just breathe, a Voice commanded.

With fear, but lacking will to resist - as no voice had ever, in this way, directly addressed her in all the millennia of her spiritual wandering - Rhea was conscripted to obey, and so she breathed. Rhea's bones returned from the hundredfold branches of their ancient diaspora.

Therefore, we may say that the remaking of the world into the one we know today truly began with that precious, weak, and gurgling gasp. She choked and sputtered and coughed: blood spouted from the pores of every Helen-resembling girl in the world, and every Rhea-resembling mother fell down on her knees to swab her child clean with her apron. Rhea's wailing bones reassembled into a harmonizing body that was the world itself … and Helen's dreaming brood cried out in shock and ecstasy as it dreamed its own eternal dream becoming sutured to a skeleton of mortal sorrow … and its congregated flesh disbanded, the glue that bound the brood together dissolving to constituents, thus releasing Helen finally to her mother's loving, ghostly care, while the children scampered willy-nilly to the corners of the earth, carefree in their antics, hilarious in their laughter, not a whisper of the dream remembered even as they worshiped Rhea and her daughter Helen and gathered families to homestead on the perfect landscapes they had themselves, so long ago, Created in a dream.