“I could still do it, if I had the time. I’ve been dream-walking for years, so I’m pretty good at it. Sure, it would be extremely difficult to find you, and we’d have to be asleep at the same time, so I’d have to figure out your time zone and plan around that — and then I’d have to sleep long enough to find you because there’s going to be millions of people between here and your city — but I’m pretty confident, yeah, I could do it.”

“I see. Damn, they don’t have ‘Sandstorm.’ And I’m still hungry. Hey, do we still want that ‘Potato Mountain’?”

“Sure. Order a couple of beers, too. And see if they have ‘Dream On’ by Aerosmith.”

“Okay. Now, what if I wanted you to … walk into one of my sisters’ dreams. Could you do that?”

“Yup,” he says without missing a beat.

“How? You’ve never met her.”

“I don’t have to meet her. It’d be harder because I’d have to approach a lot of people and say ‘Hey, are you Cybelle’s sister?’ and odds are I might never meet her, what with the odds of finding one person in seven billion who all sleep at an inestimable number of times in a twenty-four-hour period. But if you’re asking if I have the ability to find her without meeting her in person, then yeah. Absolutely.” He winks at me. “How else do you think I found you?”

“Yeah, right.” I bite my lip as I find “Dream On” and queue it up. “What if I wanted you to find my great-grandmother in Timbuktu, who doesn’t speak a word of English?”

“You have a great-grandmother in Timbuktu?”

“No. But if I did?”

“Still doable.”

“Even if she doesn’t speak English?”

“She doesn’t have to. We could still communicate. My grandpa called it ‘yumego.’ It’s like a universal language. One person speaks, the other understands. Language in dreams doesn’t matter as much as you’d think.” Zaniel reads the look on my face. “Don’t ask me how. It just works that way.”

“I thought you were the expert on all this!”

“So did I, until I met you.”

I shift around in my seat. This guy really knows how to flirt, doesn’t he? “Wait, hang on. That doesn’t make any sense! Couldn’t I just show you a picture of someone and you say, ‘Okay, I’m going to dream about this person’ and you go into your dream state, thinking you’re in that person’s dream?”