Madness.

A living wheel of fire, burning itself up in agony, turning through the middle distance and into the foreground.

An invisible barrier, an impediment, against which the wheel grated for a number of seconds before disintegrating. One wheel embodying every wheel that had ever existed or would exist, accounted for in this last violent act.

Skulls orbiting skulls, viewed as though through a mirror. Laughing, mocking skulls with their great central star. Skulls viewed through skulls, the eye's ossuary.

These among the simple dream-symbols through which my mind cycled as I tried not to fall asleep at something after three in the morning during the first of what is likely to be many turgid night-shifts.

I saw spiders pushed through a tube inclined at twenty-past the hour, from which emerged dolls and cities and plumes of smoke.

They let me out of work early, and I walked home cursing the night. The night a broad oblong of penumbra high above my head, signifying nothing. Being so tired that you can't separate dreams from reality must be what it's like to go mad. Perhaps it is the first stage of madness, when the internal and external worlds fuse and cool, so there is no going back.