"If someone in the past has built a replica in the Dreamlands, of course, then that might mean..." Hmm. Perhaps this isn't the time for idle speculation.

"I - hm. I do dream about Carcosa but not, uh... It doesn't - feel like solely a dream-place. The dreams feel less accurate to it than what I could derive about it while waking, if that makes sense. It's not the same as The City but it still has a, a concrete feeling about it. Mm, this is just a lot to take in. To assess."

"Yeah, it-- kind of has to be."

"Do you... go there? You must, to know all this."

"Yes. Every night for as long as I can remember. It's-- why I'm here in London, because my dream-self managed to tell my waking-self that it was real, and that every time I'd dreamed about dropping everything to go climb a mountain it really had happened, and I could just leave Bombay if I wanted to. I got very lucky."

"...Goodness. To realize that kind of ambition in yourself - incredible." Something occurs to him. "It's - you're saying it's the same Dreamlands for everyone. One could, say, meet a person there, and then meet them in real life. ... However unlikely that may be."

"One could."

Terrence nods, slowly. "I never dreamt of people much. Maybe moreso when I was younger. ...But. ...There were things around The City that were... not people. Nor cats. Were they... real." He says this kind of afraid of what he suspects is the answer.

"It's all real. I don't know how many of them you could find on Earth."

"...........................I see."

"But there are some things that only exist there and not here, surely? The cities themselves, in the degenerate case." What terror of the night are they talking around here. Should Sal be afraid.

"I have no idea because whenever I try to research magic it turns out to be a scam, for the obvious reasons."

"You think most supposed magic is in fact fraudulent?" Terrence asks thoughtfully. "Even though your kind is real."

"I mean, I have actual psychic powers and I still make a living by cold-reading people and pretending I got it from tarot cards. Probably it depends on which supposed magic you're looking at, but everything I've found in the London occult scene has turned out to be just-- defrauding people who want a mystery to believe in and will pay for it."

"Humans get to the Dreamlands by dreaming, but you said cats can physically go there," says Sal, still hung up on the idea of nightmare beings. "Is there anything that just lives there? That isn't visiting from Earth?"

"I don't know! I assume there are at least some? But I don't know."

"I've certainly never seen anything like some of the creatures there on earth - but I'm coming to understand that there are more things in heaven and earth then I should presume to be aware of. ...I'm, uh, I admit I'm reeling a little, I feel like I've gone to ask a question of a history teacher and been provided not with a book, but with an introduction to a living Aztec king who happened to be in town."

"I'm still not entirely certain this isn't some tremendously good hoax," Sal admits. "Just certain enough to go around asking people weird questions about the occult and getting books checked over before I read them."

"Fair," Inaaya says, no apparent offence taken.

"And Sal, this - the Dreamlands - this is hearsay, this doesn't sound... familiar for you?"

"I had dreams about strange architecture when I was a child. I don't really remember them. I help design buildings now. It's consistent with all this being real but I really think I would have been dreaming about that sort of thing either way."

"Right. Understandable."

"The cats are what did it for me. The books helped but I think that told me more about the books than about Inaaya, we did that after the cats."

"I... don't know many cats, but I'll, uh, keep my eye out. For. One to.... um... Oh, no. It has to be weird that we own them, right??? That's no good at all."

"For what it's worth they mostly don't perceive themselves as owned."