Dreams reflect waking life because it was remarkably cold as I was driving to my therapy appointment. Spot and Lilah were in the car. Lilah was hiding behind the passenger seat while Spot held court on the back seat. The clinic had a small, covered parking garage where I got a ticket and left the cats inside while I pursued my course of psychological therapy.

My therapist's office was significantly larger and reminded me of one of the bombed out buildings in Fallout 3. There wasn't a roof, a few desks were against the walls and support columns reached towards the sky. Two dogs ran from the back of the room. One was Harley the black lab my therapist is currently training to be a therapy dog and the other dog was a yellow lab who was equally thin as Harley and a bit more gregarious. As I knelt to share greetings with the pups I noticed a cage on a nearby desk. Within the red metal cage was a tiny sparrow with the head of a german shepherd.

While I was staring at the chimera my therapist came out and invited me back to begin our session. He didn't say a thing about the weird hybrid on his desk. None of the dogs were particularly interested and lay down on the floor. In my therapist's office were the torsos of two boys. They were headless and lacking limbs but they had already healed over which meant they were still alive.

Behind me I could hear my voice when I was just a little kid. He was talking to me like an adult rather than his grown-up self. My therapist had cloned me and was vivisecting the bodies in hopes of finding the root cause of my black ass moods. As if there was something greater and more profound than being abused and rejected by the one person who is traditionally the only human being on Earth who will love their own child.

When I returned to my car the cats were gone.