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You're at a cafe. At the next table is a colorfully dressed woman. Her pale, expressionless face betrays no age, but her black hair, knotted at the nape of her neck and stray frizz in a nimbus about her head, is shot with white. She is bent intently over the sketchbook in which she's working, such that you can't see her eyes. Surreptitiously, you glance at the page beneath her hand. A few quickly sketched studies, a grocery list, a technical diagram, a few lines of musical score, a post-it note. She straightens and stretches, and as she sips from her cappuccino, you sneak another look. While her pen is still on the table, more words and pictures are bleeding up through the paper: annotations, corrections, drolleries, graffiti, commentary.

That's when you realize you are dreaming.

And you realize, in the logic of dreams, that the pictures in her sketchbook are made of words. They are pictures of ideas, of things that cannot be pictured. And that there are people somehow in the book, writing on her pages from the inside. It strikes you to wonder if there are not, perhaps, infinite cafes with infinite artists, each writing through the pages onto one another's books, in some great confraternity of sketchers.

Suddenly, you are looking her full in the face. It is impossible to read, cool and still. Her eyes are b--

Oh. The reason you can see her face is that you, too, are now in the book, looking up from the page.

She smiles slowly, as if she knows something, and closes the book.

That's when you realize you're not dreaming.

---

About your host:

Siderea is a psychotherapist programmer (rhymes with "philosopher king" and "warrior poet") by trade. When she started this journal in late 2003, she had become disenchanted with software development after more than a decade, and was trying to figure out what she would rather be doing with her life. She figured it out in 2004, and returned to school to become a therapist. She worked her way through grad school (2004-2009) as a coder for a wacky non-profit STEM education R&D ("the office" or "techjob" in contemporaneous posts), then for a year and a half (to the end of 2010) she split her work-week fifty-fifty between techjob and fulfilling her postgraduate practice requirements at an out-patient clinic ("the clinic" or "psyjob"). At the close of 2010 she was mercifully laid off from techjob, and applied herself to her postgraduate work at psyjob full-time, culminating in her attaining professional licensure in 2012. Since then, she's been working at psyjob part time while working on opening a private practice ("practice").

She is an early musician, though these days she's not been very active. She has a specialty in Renaissance dance music (1450-1651) and interests throughout the Medieval and Renaissance periods. She enjoys recreational sight-singing, composing/arranging, and directing ensembles. Her primary instruments these days are voice, recorder, and gothic harp (which she has just recently taken up). She was raised pianist, but is now lapsed; along the way she picked up and played a wide variety of other instruments.

She enjoys writing creative non-fiction and uses her journal as a stage for those works. While she writes about all the above, her journal is perhaps best known for her writing on the "PAS Stack": topics in the intersection of psychology, anthropology, and sociology. She has particular interest in the history and politics of psychiatric nosology; in systems dynamics, entitiativity, identity, and norms; and in issues around culturally competent counseling.

She is a proud member of the Greater-Boston Weirdo-American community, rubbing shoulders with minstrels, mummers, circus performers, hackers, phreakers, freaks, SMOFs, medievalists, fortune tellers, role play gamers, imaginary aristocrats, novelists, foley artists, archivists, burners, poets, glass blowers, jewelers, rabble rousers, mad (or perhaps just a bit peevish) scientists, mathematicians, and all divers sorts of phantasmagoric riffraff. These are the sort of fellow-travelers you will find scrawling on these etheric leaves.

Also, she occasionally prophesies.

Spirituopolitically, Siderea's a neo-orthodox post-militant reform Surrealist. Like i, she projects into the imaginary plane, occasionally appearing (or so she is told) in other people's fiction by day and dreams by night, where she apparently has a sideline as a freelance psychopomp. Reality doesn't entirely work normally around her, fluctuating in a high synchronicity/mythopoetic field. You have been warned.