a snippet.

In the fuzzy hour between sleeping and waking is the hour that it visits. It's soft, wrapping old sweaters around its sharp feet to dull the sound of walking on your wooden floors. Breathing in and out of the frosted windows, it keeps its visits short, collecting what it needs before delicately sliding you back in between your sheets.

Collecting dreams is a a tricky business. The good ones are like warm butter, slipping through its spindly grey fingers. So the Lockelomb has developed a method. After the dreamer is on top of the covers- It cannot collect when sheets are in the way- it crouches by the edge of the bed and slides the good dreams out, catching them in its inside jacket pocket. The pocket is covered in patches, mostly cut from the sweaters the Lockelomb wears around its feet. It wants to be certain the good dreams don't escape.

Finding and apprehending the bad dreams is easier. It simply takes off it's red knit cap, faded and frayed, and the nasties spring to attention, leaping one by one into the hat. Occasionally, one might try to escape into the bathroom, attempting to slide quickly under the shower mat. But the Lockelomb always knows when one is missing. He doesn't even have to count.

But the favorite dreams are the weird ones. The ones where your mother looks like you, but you know it's actually your mother. Where you are running, running, to get to your cello lesson on time, even though you don't play the cello, and even though you are standing on the bottom of the ocean with angler fish licking your glowing toes. What makes these dreams the best for the Lockelomb is the difficulty that arises when trying to categorize them. The miscellaneous dreams, the ones that are there just to fill up seconds of white space, those come to rest inside of the Lockelomb's sweaters. But some dreams, some dreams just aren't so easy to claim. Some dreams are weird, but just eerie enough to make you shuffle uneasily under your quilt while you're sleeping. Those are its favorites. When it finds those dreams, it sits down, right in the middle of your bedroom floor, and sorts them out by size, scariness, and weirdness. Then it carefully places each dream in the right storage compartment. A little lonely game.