Mengjing

The Dream Police are a transient force in the City’s biennial Panics, appearing at the height of collective fear and then disintegrating. Their episode reverses the usual image of an all-powerful police authority: they can storm the City, but cannot endure there, and their disappearance leaves the surrounding world to settle itself again.

Appearance During the Panics

During the biennial Panics, the Dream Police storm the City. The Mugwumps respond by retreating into the deepest crevices of a wall, sealing themselves inside clay cubicles and remaining in biostasis for weeks. Their retreat places the Police within an atmosphere of widespread disruption rather than ordinary civic order.

At the same time, the Reptiles dart about at accelerating speed, crossing one another in a state of frantic movement. The City’s inhabitants and creatures thus respond to the Panic in sharply different ways: the Mugwumps withdraw and wait, while the Reptiles become increasingly active.

Disintegration and Aftermath

The Dream Police do not hold the City after their arrival. They disintegrate into globs of ectoplasm, which are swept away by an old junky coughing and spitting in the morning. The abruptness of this collapse makes the Police less a durable institution than a temporary manifestation of the Panic.

Afterward, the Mugwump Man arrives with alabaster jars of fluid, and the Reptiles are smoothed out. The sequence moves from invasion and disorder to dissolution and attempted restoration, but it offers no account of the Police returning or of the Panic being permanently overcome.

Narrative Significance

The episode sets the language of policing against a world where authority is unstable and its apparent force can vanish. The Dream Police are frightening in their arrival but materially fragile in their ending; the old junky’s mundane act of sweeping them away punctures their imposing name. Their appearance belongs to a larger pattern in which the City’s transformations are episodic, and apparent control gives way to strange, provisional forms of recovery.