Farting. (excerpted from Travelling the road of used dreams by Professor Hector Ramble) "For a considerable number of years I have been travelling the country in an attempt to discover the nature of farts. What is a fart? What creates them? Where do they go? To answer these questions I gathered together groups of people from different backgrounds and asked them to record the number of farts they emitted and suppressed, along with full details of their surroundings and the events in their lives immediately preceding the fart, ie, had they been swimming, running, sitting still, etc. This radical experiment has been the first extensive, objective test of its kind and has incurred scorn from my colleages who prefer to work with what they call 'the infinity of individuality and personal error.' However, it is my belief that tests like the one I have devised, which collect quantities of information and boil it down to a single narrowly-defined outcome, can work adequately in certain cases. Is extreme subjectivity really so important to our scientists that they cannot tolerate alternatives? In the case of my farting subjects I broke the information down in several different ways. First, I tried to group the results on the basis of activity, but there were so many activites listed that no conclusions could be drawn. Also, some groups engaged in activites which had no parallel in other groups. For example, farmers from the North-West had no equivalent for 'Fishing,' which was an activity often recorded along the coast. I discovered that fisherpeople frequently fart before setting out, but rarely fart while fishing is taking place. How is this to be rendered useful when farmers record no change in fart rate before and during their own work? Clockwork artists recorded as many farts as farmers, so I could not draw conclusions about the effect of physical activity (farmers) vs. inactivity (clockworkers.). After many similarly inconclusive experiments, an overall pattern emerged. Farts during afternoon/evening: Few Farts during the middle of the day: Middling Farts during morning: Frequent to middling. Farts during early morning: Frequent It was clear that farting occurred most often after sleep. Armed with this information I asked several subjects to tell me how their bodies felt immediately after farting. The reaction was universal: 'relieved,' 'as if a swelling had been lanced,' 'more comfortable.' It was my conclusion that farts consist of a congestant which would be harmful to the human body if retained. Coupling this with the observation that most farts are released soon after sleep, I realised that farts are in fact used dreams." Common fart etiquette: Farting in the communal bath, even when unaccompanied, is taboo. Farting during meals is frowned upon. Farting during sleep will bring bad luck. After Professor Hector's findings were widely accepted (about one hundred years ago) people decided that sleep-farting brought about bad luck because it released dreams before the brain could digest them. Deprived of this essential nighttime sustanance, the body woke the next morning in a clumsy, underwitted state, prone to accidents and illnesses.