Everytime I daydream these days I think about happy skeletons. I don’t really know if they’re really happy but they sure do act like it. They dance around playing each other’s bones like marimbas. From a distance they seem to be having an old fashioned skeleton rumble, attacking each other, then pausing, trembling and living in the chords and melodies they create. The swirling strands of music oscillate back and forth and from every direction. Mostly they create discord, shaking, and making me anxious. If people were to see me watching they would probably think I hurt my neck or tasted something bitter. Sometimes though the strands arrange themselves into beautiful swirling melodies and I try not to cry, because I am a grownup now. After that I think about myself and realize that the skeletons dance in a cave. The cave is warm though and smells good, like a blanket that’s been in cedar drawer. Purple fungus glows on the walls but casts a warm yellow light. This doesn’t make sense but I don’t really think about it because there is a large storm window set into the cave ceiling. It is at this moment that I discover that I can look anywhere I want without moving, and I immediately investigate this window. Upon closer inspection I can see that the storm shutters are in motion, driven by some old fashioned, but well oiled gears. They are steadily, slowly, continually opening and closing, opening and closing. I go back to my body and get the rest of my senses return to the window and see a long smooth shaft through the stone, like a laundry chute. I can feel more than hear a deep rumbling coming through the shaft, oscillating like the skeleton dance, growing in intensity and volume as the shutters open, then diminishing as they close again. I wait for them to open again and my senses and I rush through, and we do a little unnecessary maneuver as we just make it, like jumping over the laser that stops the garage door from closing. We travel down the shaft and it is far but I don’t mind because I left my fatigue to keep an “eye” on the skeletons. At the end of the shaft, we see a factory. My sight tells me that I am in an huge, poorly lit, indoor space, and my smell tells me about gear oil, fuel, and worn belts. None of my senses can tell me what this place is, aside from that it reminds them of a rubber factory, except emptier, and without the goo and black dust caked all around. The place is so big my senses scatter. I go and round them up, catching them one by one with burlap sack I found, and hooking them to a piece of wire like fish on a stringer. Once we are all together I drag them to the center of the room, and there is the machine. I expected, the mise-en-scene being what it was, that I would find something like this, but it was everything and nothing like I’d imagined. I’d imagined I’d find a shiny robot, looking sad turning a crank on a giant victrola (or however you spell that), and generating the subsonic frequencies upon which the skeletons danced. That isn’t what I found though. Its difficult to describe, but what I saw was a massive pile, thats the best way to describe it, of interlocking gears, of every conceivable size and variety, sun gears, worm gears, beveled and crown gears. I even noticed a gear with slanted teeth, which, my curiousity was later to inform me, was a double helical gear. In any case, this pile shifted and groaned turning and churning, powered by god knows what. It was dazzling to look at. The thing seemed to play with the light reflecting and bouncing it inside itself like a street juggler turned inside out. It was greedy for light, and that probably explained the dimmness of the room. With sound however, it boomed, deeply rumbling. I was glad for the wire or my hearing would have run off for good. At first I was scared thinking that it was angry, but as I remained in the presence of this thing, I noticed a thread of sadness in all the rumbling. As this thing noticed that I noticed the thread got louder. My voice shouted from far away that the skeletons were breaking each others bones now, and I sent my touch to go get my voice. My voice told me that my good sense told it to let the damn thing speak, the skeletons are already dead and they’ve been riding that gravy train too long anyway. So I did. My imagination tells me that the skeletons are ok and that some of them even have new semitones to experience, but I don’t really know, because they’re not real, and even if they were I’ve got a lot of other stuff I should be worring about.