Careful not to work from memory, she reads the poem off the wall, all the way through, and then once more for luck. "Between the kisses and the wine..." and precious little of either recently. She cranks the handle of the lantern and smiles, as she always does, at the cracked image on the wall. She fumbles the tennis ball as it comes down, and it thuds dully off into the corner of the room. The laws of physics are indeed intact, and that is all the reassurance the universe will provide. The other recognisable traits of dreams are more difficult to separate from waking life. The endless re-encountering of the same people, for example, and the echoing restatement of the same conversations, to the point where it seems that only a few humans actually inhabit the earth, and all the other billions exist simply as shades and mannequins, is also an experience common to both post-industrial society and the worldview of sociopaths.