I dreamed briefly of being Kiril with Reno in the tent, and Reno telling me he lost his gun.  This fit well with the other dream of the tavern encounter, so I put them back to back and added some embellishment.

I wrote about Jake finding the note in his bed.

Dreaming about dancing before a Dia de los Muertos altar showed me nothing but strangers, so I made them the Dead of Deirdre and Lufti.  I added the nightmare twist at the end because I had to when I made it Deirdre's dream.  In my own dream I wound up working in the kitchen after the dance, struggling to try and provide for everybody, with Margo Leiber helping me keep up, though the work got harder and harder.

Suddenly I noticed that one of the guests had a hole right through her middle, and another laughed through two mouths, one of them actually a slit in his throat.  I cried out, "You're dead!"

At that point, with her inimitable sassy style, Margo put one fist on her stout hip and snapped, "We're all dead, honey, and it's high time you realized it!"  And I woke up not frightened, but grateful and amused.  Margo, who had died a few months before, wanted to help me let go of the ghosts of my past, ghosts I kept trying in vain to placate.

As for the mash-up that follows, while lying abed in pain on a different occasion, I slipped in and out of dreams, sometimes consciously planning writing in my mind, as soon as I could sit up, and sometimes these speculations turned into dreams.  I did dream of Bijal drugging me and treating my wounds, and this helped to ease the pain in my waking-world body.  And it all got mixed up with baking biscuits and breakfasting with the Marsts.  No way could I possibly now separate the parts derived from my waking thoughts from those derived from dreams.

If I weave different stories and viewpoints together rather than write a standard linear tale, it is because I do not live a standard, linear life.  Hemingway said, "Write what you know."