Word for Word, Nine Days Early

My brother and I talk maybe monthly; he is a marine engineer and his schedule is chaos. The dream call arrived on a night I had not thought about him at all.

In it, I answered the phone and the conversation ran with unusual continuity for a dream — no scene-slips. He said he had news and to sit down but it was good news. He said the words 'they finally signed the Aberdeen thing.' He complained about a colleague named or nicknamed Sparky. He said the ship's cook had adopted a penguin — 'not really adopted, more like it invoiced us' — and laughed his hiccup laugh. He ended with 'tell Mum I'll bring the good chocolate, she'll know.'

It was so coherent that I wrote it down at breakfast, dated it, and — this is the part I thank myself for — emailed it to my own address with the subject 'weird dream call', because email timestamps are nobody's property.