DREAM HUNTERS

--A sect of Khazar priests whose protectress was Princes Ateh. They could read other people's dreams, live and make themselves at home in them, and through the dreams hunt the game that was their prey--a human, an object, or an animal. A note left by one of the oldest dream hunters has been preserved, and it reads: "In dreams we feel like fish in water. Occasionally we surface from a dream and skim an eye over the world on shore, but again we descend with yearning haste, for it is only in the depths that we feel good. During these brief sorties we notice on dry land a strange creature, more sluggish than ourselves, accustomed to breathing in a manner different from our own, and glued to the land with all its weight, deprived of the passion we inhabit like our own bodies. For here below, passion and body are indistinguishable, they are one and the same thing. That creature out there, that is to is us, but a million years from now, and between it and us, aside from the years, lies a terrible calamity that has befallen it, because that creature out there has separated the body from passion. . . "

One of the most famous dream readers was reportedly named Mokaddasa Al-Safer. He was able to probe into the deepest recesses of secrets, to tame fish in people's dreams, to open doors in people's visions, to dive deeper into dreams than anyone before him, straight down to God, for at the bottom of every dream lies God. But something happened, and never again was he able to read dreams. For a long time he thought he had reached the pinnacle and that, indeed, there was nowhere else to take his mystical skill. He who reaches the end of a road needs it no longer, and the road is not given to him anymore. But those around him thought differently. They once confided the matter to Princess Ateh, who then explained to them the case of Mokaddasa Al-Safer:

Once a month, on the salt holiday, followers of the Khazar kaghan fight a life-or-death battle against you, my followers and charges, in the outskirts of our three capitals. When night falls, while we are burying his dead in Jewish, Arab, or Greek graves, and mine in Khazar graves, the kaghan quietly opens the copper door of my chamber, bearing a candle whose flame smells and trembles from his passion. I do not look at him, for he resembles all lovers the world over who have been struck in the face by happiness. The two of us spend the night together, but when he departs at dawn I look at his reflection in the shiny copper of my door and can recognize in his fatigue what he intends to do, where he is going from, and who he is.

And so it is with your dream hunter. There is no doubt that he has reached one of the hights of his art, that he has prayed in the temples of other's dreams, and that he has been killed countless times in the souls of dreamers. He has been so successful in his calling that the finest substance in existence--the substance of dreams--has begun to give in to him. And even if he made not a single error in his ascent toward God, and thus it was given to him to see God at the bottom of the dream he was reading, he certainly made some error on his return, while descending into this world from the hights which he had risen. And for that error he has paid. Beware of the return! So concluded Princess Ateh, a bad descent can obliterate the successful scaling of a mountain.