I dreamt that I was sitting with a few friends and talking about someone we all knew well, but I do not remember who it was. All I remember is that one of the friends was Persian. At some point I said a single word, which was supposed to sum up all there was to tell about the person we were talking about: “Ifriq.” For some reason I remember the spelling, too. The Persian friend turned toward me in surprise: “Mouse?” I nodded in agreement but did not elaborate. I remember being quite surprised that I came up with this Persian word out of the blue. When I woke up, I searched the World Wide Web for an online English-Persian dictionary. I found quite a number of dictionaries in no time, and many of them gave me what I was looking for, but in Persian squiggles. Try as I might, I could not find a single dictionary with a spelling of the word in Latin, Cyrillic, Greek or any other comprehensible characters. Although I returned to my computer several times during the day, all I ever got were the old squiggles. The probability that the word I uttered in my dream means anything at all in Persian is less than slight, anyhow.