I rarely remember my dreams. But I am assured that they still happen. Or at least the same patterns of electrical activity that correlate with waking reports of a dream. Though this is fine for my brain, it leaves me feeling a bit cheated. Thankfully I own a copy of The World Doesn’t End by Charles Simic, which has many fine short pieces I can recite and pass off as my own whenever the conversation during the party/train ride/hostage situation turns the sad corner to ‘Dreams’. This is one of my current mainstays, which you may of course feel free to appropriate, should you also suffer from the same deficit, and are at a different party or bank to myself.

My thumb is embarking on a great adventure.

“Don’t go, please,” say the fingers. They try to hold

him down. Here comes a black limousine with a

veiled woman in the back seat, but no one at the

wheel. When it stops, she takes a pair of gold

scissors out of her purse and snips the thumb off.

We are off to Chicago with her using the bloody

stump of my thumb to paint her lips.