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About a month ago I was in Berlin Every night I had a very strange dream I was watching an American chat show filmed in front of a live audience Except it wasn’t live, not exactly, but had the woozy shimmer of an old videocassette   After a storm of applause James Brown appeared and began to shriek and grunt just like he did when he was alive, like a kettle on fire Only these were not his usual yelps and squeals, those familiar words he tricked out into sound effects, ‘Baby! Please! Come on!’ They were names and areas taken straight from the fiction of William Burroughs Like an evil emcee he called out for the Subliminal Kid, the Mugwump Crew and everybody out there in Interzone There followed a blizzard of noise, sitcom whoops and shrieks of pleasure The Godfather of Soul, in my dream, was back from the dead I hadn’t read Burroughs for a long time but this dream became a brainworm, a loop that would never stop, a needle stuck in the same spot forever I had never exorcised him completely: Burroughs had been echoing around my head I had never felt the need to go back because he haunted me, appearing in films and on records, when I dreamed and when I woke and inside all the dislocated, hazy states I entered into at his word  I wanted to go back into the Interzone now, which still glowed in my memory like radioactive waste, to repel the ghost of my dream After hearing James Brown scream, I began to think of Burroughs’ work as a set of recordings, full of strange and fascinating sounds: a cacophony of gunshots, static, wolf howls, radio noise, joujoka pipes or, cutting randomly into Naked Lunch, ‘explosions of matter in cold interstellar space’ Somewhere, for an encore, James Brown listing them all like the symptoms that appear with nightmarish clarity on the bodies of Burroughs’ phantom junkies or, in his own slow and threatening drawl, describing toxic substances made by occult systems sinister beyond words Transcribing Burroughs’ ghostly