Heavy midnight. The crawl of the planchette under our fingertips. The triptych was coming alive. One creature sprang from the painted panel. A beast, horned and elephantine, illuminated by the moon through the cellar window.
It spoke to us through the board:
“Extradimensional bovine dreamfeeders graze upon fronds that sprout from the heads of sleepers. These dreams—long, lush, iridescent fancies rooted in neuronic soil and flowering up into the night—are their food.
“The beasts lumber through a meadow of musing at night, their jaws drooling plasmic sludge, their snorts ruffling moppet heads from across the chasm of dimension. They pass unperceived. But sometimes there is an alignment of world to world. A hallway, connecting one dimension to another. And you feel something in your sleep as they chomp. A brain tug.
“If the dream is too strong, the stalk too thick, the beast will pull and pull, dragging you toward the doorway. Sometimes it will pull your whole mind into its world. You, a seedling to keep nearby. Body in your world, mind in theirs. Forever insane in one, forever flowing the richest food in the other.”
The first story I remember writing was about a man who caught a two-headed fish. He held it in his hand, marveling at it for a while, and then he noticed that it had another hook in it's mouth. Somebody else had caught it and let it go. So he carefully removed his hook and set it free.
I don't know how old I was when I wrote that, but I'm still trying to write a better story.