This one is dedicated to Tony. He should recomember (That's a portmanteau word, in the spirit of Lewis Carroll — recollect and remember merged into one.) a dream experience that he related to me when we were both much younger and living on Beale AFB in California.

I was having a dream last night. The contents of the dream aren't important. (No, it wasn't anything that I'm embarassed to relate in a public forum.) At one point in the dream a tour group showed up at the place where I was working. The tour guide, whom I never saw— I could only hear her voice, was describing the machine that I was working with.

Suddenly, there was a loud pop sound and her voice lost a lot of fidelity and in fact started sounding like she was talking over a cheap radio. And what she was saying changed too.

It took a few moments for it to sink in, but that pop sound is my clock radio turning on. And the tour guide was the woman who does the morning news blurbs on the moldy-oldies station that I have my radio set to. The day was beginning and I was awake.

This left me with some questions about dream states.

• Did I hear the pop sound in real time?
• Assuming I heard the pop in real time, why was the radio announcer's voice in my dream before the radio came on?
• If the pop wasn't real time, then I have to assume that I dreamed it. So was the ending of the dream all engineered for the purpose of cushioning my waking transition? I.e. I was dreaming when the radio went off and my unconcious fit the sounds I was hearing in my sleep into the dream context so that when I made the waking transition I would already be prepared for the real world environment.
• What are the implications of that last supposition for our psyche's? It certainly wasn't a danger situation that I needed to be prepared for. Also, unless the dream were already a fight or flight motif, I'm not sure that I'd want that sort of covering on the transition. I might wake less prepared for a dangerous situation. I think it would be better to be groggy and certain that I was awake, than needing to make quick decisions and in doubt about whether I was dreaming.