I woke up, and it was all a dream.

When I was teaching, I used to tell my middle-schoolers (in my latter years) that if they ever used for an ending of a story they were writing the sentence you see as the title of this post, well, automatic F.

I never had to impose that punishment, however: There's something about automatic F that resonates (or resonated, anyhow) with eighth graders.

We'll get to the endings of stories in just a sec.

One assignment I tried a few times (and it seemed to go fairly well) was to give students an opening sentence, and for a couple of years I gave them opening sentences I liked from novels I liked. Sure, I used Call me Ismhael as one of them, but I think my favorite was this one from Larry McMurtry's 1987 Texasville:

Duane was in the hot tub, shooting at his new doghouse with a .44 Magnum.

Now, some good stories came out of that one, I can tell you!

When I worked on writing fiction with my eighth graders, we would practice a variety of things--descriptions, sequencing and dating, beginnings, dialogue, employing the thoughts of characters, and so on.

And, of course, endings.

I proscribed, as I said, the "dream" ending (too hackneyed, too easy a way out of a problem you've written yourself into), though I well knew that some great works of fiction had employed that device to one extent or another. (Shakespeare springs to mind.) And those of us of a certain age can remember how the old TV nighttime soap Dallas explained away an entire season by declaring it had all been a dream.

Anyway, for some reason, sitting in the coffee shop yesterday, I thought about how that it-was-all-a-dream ending might make for a much more interesting beginning sentence. Where, I wondered, could that sentence lead you?

Let's see ...

I woke up, and it was all a dream. I grabbed my phone, checked the date. The time. It was 6 a.m. My usual time. But the date! The date! My phone--which never lies--said it was 2015 ....

You get the idea. All of the crap that's actually happened the past few years has not happened ... Now that is a dream from which I wish I'd never been awakened.