I have chanced upon an advisory called Rael’s Citation Guide for Weird and Difficult Sources. Disappointingly, though predictably, it turns out to deal with things like historical government documents; so here (from someone who once needed a notation for citing nonexistent people) are some tentative suggestions for those with really esoteric or exotic needs:

• How to cite a dream: it might be possible to cite a very lucid dream in something similar to the way one cites a video or audio recording, but how do you deal with those half-remembered dreams that blur together and mutate, night after night, in mockery of sensible sequences? Embrace the fuzziness, I suppose: use tag clouds for titles, and hope rigid dating holds the lot together. Since dream logic is not story logic, use whatever experiential taxonomy seems significant, but borrow from Freud if you so please.

  For example: On, Eric. lentils, flying, this man, whips, green (night of 15^th March 2011).

• How to cite entrails: messily; but at least these are easier than the flight of birds for citation by the systematic augur. If anything, there might be a trickily large number of ways to classify animals.

  For example: Thsayer, Susan. Ruditapes decussatus, about a month old, harvested near Lisbon, unnamed (suppertime, 15^th March 2011).

• How to cite a spirit possessing the clone of your doppelgänger: take the path of least resistance, and the credit where possible.

  For example: Seddon, Robert et al. New Directions In the Philosophy of Personal Identity (New Amsterdam: ~X~ Press, 15^th March 2011).

• How to cite a piece of software: if the program has a book to its name, a regular citation would probably do, but the exacting scholar will probe further. What about versioning? Is the compiler relevant, or the hardware used at runtime? What about linked libraries, or the operating system version? What if the source code has been ported from one language to another?

  For example: gibberish v.0.9.14 (Malbolge) and balderdash.so v.1.2.0 with Panix v.1.1.26. In Our Own DWORDs (Durham: Hex Press, 09:55:21, 15^th March 2011).