To meet a man of your dreams, you first need to dream him up. It’s quite obvious. Claire also believes the things happen in this order, and so, day after day, she spends most of her time sleeping. Alas, despite her unfaltering efforts, during her long and uninterrupted sleeping sessions, she is always missing the most important thing – dreams. And that scares her to death. Honestly, how on earth is she supposed to dream up her man, when she has no dreams at all?

She opens her fridge and gets the ice-cream bucket to think it through, but as she already did some thinking in the morning, the bucket is almost empty. No wonder her thoughts are dragging on…

She read somewhere, Claire did, that dreams come mostly as a warning to people with bad conscience, whereas people of angelic nature and pure character do not have any dreams at all. Claire agrees completely. She can literally feel all fingers pointing at her. Her conscience is good – too good, some might say.

“So, if I am a bad girl, not evil, only a tiny bit bad, I will have my angelic nature distressed just enough to get a dream or two..” thinks Claire, licking her memory of ice-cream off the spoon. She can feel she is onto something here… But what if the dream thus obtained will be also bad, or very bad, or even a nightmare?

Good or bad, to Claire it matters not. She can always twist the plot once she’s in there. All she needs is a dream. Any dream. And she needs it now.

The spoon has scratched the bottom of her container of the frozen joy. Ice-cream is the fuel for her cognitive processes and now the train of her thoughts, if we might use that metaphor, has stopped for good.

On her mobile phone, in just a few well-rehearsed moves of her finger, Claire orders a new batch of buckets for the next few days. She needs to keep that train going.

“You ate all that ice-cream, didn’t you?” says Claire chidingly as she puts the empty bucket to the bin. “You are a bad, bad girl, aren’t you?” she continues. “Yes, I am.” she is smiling now. She approaches her bed and lies down in it.

Not to lose the momentum of her badness, she rolls over and goes back to work.