Since 1988 author William Poundstone (Fortune's Formula, Big Secrets) has been recording those curious dreams in which one conceives an idea, joke, or invention that seems brilliant in the dream—but is absurd the next morning. Poundstone's dream musings, by turns comic, poetic, and numinous, have found a wide audience on the web and in print. This new eBook edition features an original essay and illustrations.
• A brilliant, idealistic scheme to transmit everything on the Internet in Morse code, for the benefit of people who don't have a computer but do have a ham radio set.
• A sitcom about a character named "Jesus." Costumes, settings, and plots are deliberately ambiguous so that you never know whether he's the biblical one or just some Latino guy.
• Permanent Velcro. You can stick it together but you can't pull it apart. I was sure it would have hundreds of uses, in situations where you can't use regular Velcro.
• The most original practical joke of all time had me signing Frank Sinatra's name to a blank check from the architectural firm Venturi, Scott Brown. There was more to the joke than that, and there were other people involved, but my role was the pivotal one.
"So hilarious, perfectly useless, and weirdly inspiring that chances are you'll wind up dreaming about it." —ED PARK, author of Personal Days
