Tortoise

I had always wanted a tortoise, until later I found out that you have to keep them in a run that they can't see out of, and that seemed cruel to me.
Anyway, now I don't have so much as a blade of grass in the back yard.
But when the Offsprogs were little, I dreamed that I worked in the nursery part of a primary school, and they were giving away their tortoise.
How exciting! Of course I volunteered to take it, thinking how excited the Offsprogs would be.
Suddenly, in a moment of self- awareness, I realised that it was all just a dream.
'Aha', I said, 'This is all a dream and although I can even feel the scaly tortoise in my hands, as soon as I wake up, it will be gone and I will have no present to give to the Offsprogs'.
'Aha', said the dream back to me, 'This is a special sort of dream in which if you are given something to take away with you, it is actually real, and it's there when you wake up.'

So, of course, I believed the special dream; and so, of course, I woke empty-handed and sheepish with no tortoise to give to my little girls.