Teaching the Dog to Read Read Online Free PDF

these years, it’s a real pleasure being bored for a while.”
    That answer made sense to Tony Day but he still was puzzled about something. “If I am in charge of things here, and I arrange the ingredients of your dreams, why that stampede now? I didn’t order it. Alice and the car yes, but not that.” He pointed down the road.
    Tony Night took a deep breath, knowing he was going to have to do some explaining now. “Think of it this way: when you were living where I am now, you passed your days constantly experiencing this great huge mass of various things. Whether you were aware of it or not, most of that stuff went into your memory and stayed : The ugly woman with the green purse at the Mexican restaurant, that long distance phone call with your funny sister…
    “It’s like you’d go to the market every day and buy bags and bags full of groceries. But there was no logic to what you put in them. Eventually you’d bring all those bags home and give them to me, Tony Night. I’d sift through what you’d brought and choose which ones I wanted to cook. Then I’d combine them together into your nightly dream.
    “But sometimes life or fate interferes. You forget to buy the tomatoes but you don’t feel like going back to the store to get them. So the meal is cooked without tomatoes. The same with my job—sometimes things get added or subtracted from the dreams because of, I don’t know, outside sources or forces or whatever you want to call it. Hey look—you’re never in complete control of either your life or your dreams. You love rhinos and bullterriers. For some reason they decided to make a guest appearance together in this dream. No reason why they showed up. But it was cool, right? So enjoy it.”
     

     
    It’s not hard to guess which Tony was lying. Lena Schabort was sensational in bed—ravenous, endlessly inventive, and almost overwhelming in her horizontal skills. But Tony Night was not about to tell his counterpart that . Hell no. If he did, what if Tony Day said he wanted to sleep with her too? Worse, what if he said I don’t want to do this switch anymore? I want to go back to who I was.
    On the other hand from the sound of it, there wasn’t much reason to worry. Tony Day was smitten with the sheer novelty and power of running Dreamland where it was true—he could create any dream he wanted to show each night on the big screen TV inside the other Tony’s head.
    In his first few attempts, the dreams he created were pretty tentative and as dull as a documentary about fish hatcheries in Finland. In one he sat in his boyhood kitchen watching his Mom make an egg soufflé while a bright orange SONY radio on the counter played pop hits from his childhood. Limahl’s song “The Neverending Story” almost had him in tears because it was so packed with happy memories. In another dream, Tony and his sister ran around a lush meadow in a driving summer rainstorm in their underwear, heads bent back, mouths wide open to catch raindrops on their tongues, arms out to either side as if they were flying. The only odd thing about it was in the dream they were adults, not little kids. And that detail, like the racing rhinoceros, was not his doing.
    It wasn’t until the eleventh dream that Tony Day returned to the bus stop by the sea and a meeting with the wonderful Alice. Why wait so long? Simply because he was afraid he might do it wrong and spoil everything. The dream where they first met had been so perfect (as far as he remembered) that if he were to continue it now, he wanted to make sure he was totally in control of what he was doing. Hell, he’d wanted to meet up with Alice the first time he created a dream in his new role but his wiser self said no, wait long enough to figure out how to do this dream-making right.
    The ingredients at his disposal were his life. The goal? To use some of them to create the perfect setting and circumstances for a second meeting with this woman who appeared to embody