Is this a dream?

What Kind of Dream Is This?
---- Big Frank Dickinson

He was very big on bifurcation and certainly nobody could dispute the truth of life = dreams + waking life. Yet, he always reminded himself that most of everything was all in the second category: all our plans, our self-esteem, our relationships, our ideas of self-improvement, our regrets, our love interests, our . . . (there are lots more). Dreams it seemed to him were a form of life that was not taken very seriously. Maybe, he thought, that was because dreams were viewed as completely outside of our control - kind of like the weather, unlike our personalities, which we tended to feel were of our making; but, were we not just kidding ourselves (about how much control we really had (in waking life).

So he took control of his dreams (it's a long story how - not for now). They became predictable, because he, like most people, liked a set scene, with a reliable cast of characters, and the dreams were limited by his conscious imagination, which - let's face it - is no way near as wild as what comes up from your wacky whatever. His dreamland was like the life that the proverbial people who abandon their current setup, family and friends and move to a distant city, only to recreate the exact thing that they ran away from. Eventually, of course, he could not tell the difference between his waking life and his dreams. One was only a slight variation on the other - bigger house in one, smaller mate in the other, three kids in one, only two in the other, red toaster vs black, ski holidays vs diving, and so on.

In time when he went to sleep he packed a lunch, and called his wife in the middle of the night to see if she wanted to have breakfast when they woke.