Unblinking: I'm glad you're glad! It's hard to know what's appropriate, as author -- it's such a treat to see discussion happening that I totally want to take part, but my DON'T RESPOND TO REVIEWS instinct kicks in, and the line between discussion and review is drawn in the sand, I think. So I want to be totally clear that I'm not trying to be proscriptive in any of this -- just to kind of offer something along the lines of DVD commentary, I guess?
That's always a difficult line to decide where to draw. The most common advice seems to be to never read reviews, and there's something to be said for that. Part of that is because some reviewers just try to be snarky for the sake of snark, working with the beginning assumption that the work sucks and trying to find the most entertaining way to say why. The main reason I stick around here is that the discussion as a whole is allowed to go either way but is based on the discussion of merits or flaws in the story itself. I am neither expected to love, nor to hate any particular story, and I feel comfortable saying what I liked and what I didn't, and hearing where other people agreed and didn't.
I like when authors stop by (and most people around here seem to), as long as they don't try to start flame wars with people who didn't like it (which you haven't). In particular, I like to hear:
1. What the author meant to convey.
2. Where the idea for the story originally sparked from.
May I ask why you see it as a dream, or what prompts you to read it that way? I'm curious! 
I'm happy to explain.
The biggest factor is the fact that the protagonist can craft dreams, even dreams for herself. She is in the business of making the dreams seem lifelike, otherwise she wouldn't be so popular. So because of that particular choice of speculative element, the possibility of some of the events being part of a dream was always kept in mind.
Beyond that, what really triggered me to think that that particular portion of the story was a dream was the combination of:
a. It seemed to end a bit too conveniently with the previously unseen Nala returning Hessa's sexual attraction.
b. It didn't seem to say how Nala could have even found Hessa.
c. She says herself that this sort of side effect is impossible.
d. She wonders herself if it is a dream.
e. Much of the story of escalating masturbation, so it fits the trend for this to be the next step.
It might be unclear what I mean by escalating masturbation. I see four steps in that escalation:
1. Her actual manual masturbation mentioned in the story, done the good old fashioned way.
2. The extension of her Nala fantasy into dreams made for others. This is an escalation because she's including other people in her fantasy by making them have her fantasy by proxy. She's rewarded not only for her pleasure in the manual masturbation, and the creation of the dreams, but also financially from her sudden success, and in artistic achievement knowing that her work is wanted, as well as the power to choose which customers she wishes to take.
3. The amethyst dream made for herself. This is an escalation because she's making the dream permanent and relivable and tuned to her own exact desires instead of fitting them to someone else's. But after some period of time this turns out to be ultimately unsatisfying, because she is too aware that is only a dream. This is evidenced by the fact that she doesn't ask for Nala's name--which she admits she would do in real life but to dream a false name and a false voice would clash with the possible reality.
4. The last segment, the new dream in which she convinces herself that Nala has actually come to her. The 3rd escalation proved unsatisfying because she is too aware that it is pure masturbation with no other party involved. The absolute control which she once enjoyed has become dull to her from repitition. So she crafts a new stone, inventing a new permutation in which Nala shows up at her shop. She puts Nala in control because her own absolute control has grown uninteresting. She invents her own crime of imposing her fantasy on others to justify the bondage. At the same time, she knows she'll gain intellectual pleasure from gaining an apprentice to teach her craft to. In the 3rd escalation, she'd neglected to give her a voice or a name, but here she explicitly does both because her voicelessness and nameless were what made it so obviously a masturbation fantasy. She even gave her a voice that isn't the silky voice she imagines she would imagine because that juxtaposition enhances the apparent truth of it "I wouldn't have given her that vioce, therefore it must be real". She knows herself well enough that she predicts her own argument and uses it to make the dream more convincing, allowing herself for the first time to believe within the space of the dream that this is REALLY happening, and not just another form of self-pleasure.
Anyway, I'm interested if you have any response to this justification and alternate interpretation.
