“You mean you can turn your dreams off, just like that?” Susan asked. I said, “A little bit. A nightmare doesn’t count as sleep, so I don’t get any real rest. I wake up even more tired.”

Michael overheard this and said, “But that’s so inefficient!”

He told me of how his real life and his dream life are becoming pretty much the same. “I must come up with a new word for what it is that goes on inside my head at night. The delineation between awakeness and asleepness is now marginal. It’s more like I’m running ‘test scenarios’ in my head at night—like RAND Corporation military simulations.”

Count on Michael to find a way to be productive, even while sleeping.