This collection of short prose, originally dating from the autumn of 1981, includes what is arguably the most literary piece John O'Loughlin has ever written - namely 'A Canine Crime', which deals with the problems of dog ownership in an age and society which has turned against such a thing, making it illegal. Also featured here is 'Nolan's Investigations', which opens the collection on a playfully erotic note, and the partly autobiographical title-piece 'Dream Compromise', which has a trick in its tail, so to speak.... As, incidentally, does the volume as a whole, in that it ends with a series of aphorisms, in keeping with the broadly philosophical bias of the author's mature literary works, in which literature, whether poetic or (as here) prosodic, is used primarily as a vehicle for philosophizing, and not simply to tell a story.