I have only two seventy-five, which means I am short a quarter. But I want to dream. I want to lay myself, hopefully, down and settle my brain chemistry with more than mere black. When I wake, I want memories. I want to have been the side-boy to adventures, the lover of an octopus, the first believer of the next religion. I want my crumbling synapses soured with Technicolor. I want to be in my sleep the tyrant I was promised.
All I need is another quarter. I cannot reason with a vending machine. Money goes in, a plastic door slides festively open, I pick up the disposable cortical attachment, and go back to my warehouse to take my chances. There is no reasoning.
But you – you have had dreams too. You have stood on the vermillion ledges of Aldebaran, your arm about the waist of a native Shaker-woman, your imagination of her delicate hooves lingering in the algebra of your taste. All I need is a quarter. A loan so small from you, yet a final break for me in so many nights of enveloping darkness.
You can use your quarter on yourself, with eleven other quarters, and go away to dream, to perhaps dream of me dreaming. Or, for that quarter, I can be at the edge of REM, a private reverie, and by you forgotten.
Or perhaps you can loan me the dream you have been harboring all this time. I will bring it back tomorrow unsullied and still breathing of its stateless wonder, all the perspiration wrung out of it. And you will know for that short loan, you split my hollow dark.