I told him to give me a chance, that I really needed the money. He hesitated but eventually agreed, giving me a report for the guy who always dreamed about electronic devices. He was thirty-four years old, a bachelor, and like I suspected, worked as a repairman at a small electronics shop. Two days ago he had fixed eleven devices, gotten off work at seven, and gone home for a shower.

I asked Bruno whether nightmares required a special technique.

“There isn’t a technique, as such,” he said, and admitted that even he found them difficult to build. He said he had once read a book that recommended going all out with the daemons and monsters routine, since it’s had a good track record for thousands of years and was practically bulletproof. Or to try different Freudian theories, to choose something symbolic and work that angle. Bruno said that in either case it didn’t always work, so I should just do what I felt like.

I didn’t know how to produce monsters and didn’t really understand enough about psychology. The only thing I could tell from all those hours monitoring his screen was that the electronics guy found it difficult communicating with people. So I built a pretty lame nightmare in which he’s just walking down the street and everyone around him is speaking in a foreign language. And he tells them he can’t understand, but no one answers him. Bruno said he didn’t see what was scary about that nightmare, but he certainly wasn’t going to pay me another hundred to build a new one.

The next day, after I punched in, Bruno told me he had just read the guy’s latest report. It stated that he couldn’t stop thinking about my nightmare after he woke up, he was so upset he barely left the house. Bruno gave me a pat on the back and said that good nightmares were great for business. That the Ministry of Health loved them, they were sure they helped people work through their issues, or something like that. He said that each dream manufacturer was required to deliver three quarterly nightmares per customer, so as far as he was concerned I could build nothing but nightmares. I asked him if he didn’t think it was a bit much, since he himself had said that it messes with your head.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” he said, and added that he had only been trying to scare me because he didn’t believe I would be good at it. I thought he might be lying, but I didn’t ask more questions because I wanted the money.