Sometimes moving down the constitutive hierarchy makes things far more interesting. What could be more banal than a conversation about holidays overheard on a bus? But choosing one narrow band of abstraction and attending to the complex interplay of temporal framings at work turns it into a wonder. Memories reworked into narratives, the triggering of responses in other temporal frames, past and future, the pacing of the utterances and so on, all embedded in a set of conversational protocols as formal as a sonnet. All of this work delivered effortlessly so that what? A subject can express itself? A dreamer can remain asleep?