Last night I had this strange dream...

I was drinking from my old bottle of Laphroaig whisky when I happened to notice that the liquor in my glass was quite cloudy, from age I supposed. I think I noticed this because I felt something against my teeth as I drank, and now, sure enough small particulates could be seen in my glass, swimming about. I say swimming because on closer inspection they were not mere pieces of scum from an old bottle, but tiny lizards with almost human faces. Some were large enough to be sen quite clearly with the naked eye. I could feel them now in my mouth as I bit down and swallowed. This new information made me a bit queazy, and I set aside my glass and returned to the matters at hand.

Someone was showing me a very old relic, pulled from the sea hundreds of years ago. It was a mass of what appeared to be human forms, writhing and entangled in a medusian coil. i say "medusian" to describe their snake-like quality but also because they were formed of stone, seemingly excreted by worms. Their trails were clearly visible now as I looked closer. Hundreds of distorted human figures piled one on another in a huge mushroom of coral-stone. Someone was explaining to me that each figure was a buddha. I asked which was the shakyamuni, confused because I could not find one representing him. A finger pointed to a small face buried beneath a pile of others toward the bottom of the relic.

"The shakyamuni was only one of a hundred thousand trillion buddhas," I was told.