PALINDROME

I did not sleep well last night, and for a particularly ridiculous reason: I became obsessed with a palindrome. It started, I suspect, with a dream in which some genius wordsmith had come up with a palindromic version of a highly technical medical instruction--something to do with my imminent hip replacement surgery--which was a whole paragraph long, surely one of the longest palindromes ever created. I was so impressed with this prodigious act of alphabetical prestidigitation that I became obsessed, between dream and waking, with trying to remember and describe it. I must have settled on "prodigious act of alphabetical prestidigitation," because there it is. I was pretty pleased with myself for having come up, if not with the palindrome, at least with its description. But I lost a lot of sleep trying to work it all out.